I just started with my first weather station this year. Who knows where the hobby will take me. I went with the Meteobridge because it seemed like a simple easy solution to publish data to many places. I want to continue to test with other software. I'll probably give Weather Display a go and WeeWx also. And who knows what else.
My biggest concern is finding something I really like at some point in the future and having missed out on having historical data because I didn't find or implement that software soon enough. Or it could be that some software not created yet comes out out. Or maybe a new online service comes out that allows uploading historical data.
So what backup safeguard methods can I do now to ensure having historical data to import, in an easy to use manner?
I'm currently uploading to an SQL database from the Meteobridge to my Synology NAS (running PHP and MariaDB 10). I'm not yet doing anything with that data. I wonder if that would be sufficient backup? My entire NAS (weather data, movies, pictures, files) is also being backed up remotely.
Should I also be saving to some other format? How easy would it be to convert my SQL data to some other format? Rather than worry about converting I'm wondering if I should for example also be doing some sort of FTP to a .csv file? If yes, then using what criteria for the data, frequency, units, etc. Is there a good standard? It would probably be easier to be saving now to multiple formats than worry about converting later maybe?
I'm also wondering if my SQL should be saving to multiple units. I just realized I'm only saving imperial but with hpa (mb) pressure because that is my preference. Maybe it needs to be either all imperial or all metric, or I'll have import issues? Or maybe I should save both units? Or should it be to two separate databases for each unit type? I may be overthinking and worrying about nothing since I'm sure it can be converted but I want to minimize problems down the line.
I'm particularly concerned to have this historical data backup strategy in place by January 1st 2019 so that I can have complete yearly rainfall starting then. So I need to figure this out before year's end.
Also for those of you doing a similar backup what frequency are you using to send backup data? I'm currently sending to my SQL only every 5 minutes. Should that be every 1 minute? Or is that too much? Since every popular online service seems to use 5 minutes (WU, CWOP, AWEKAS) I thought 5 minutes was good.