I am of the opinion that whatever WeatherLink's shortcomings, the archive files it builds (the ones with wlk extensions) are an invaluable record of your weather data. The WLK files are a virtually complete record of the data logged by the data logger, with minimal processing or other messing around with the data. Also, most weather programs will import them, so they provide a nice backup.
This is why VPLive has a feature to periodically run WeatherLink. It's so WeatherLink has an opportunity to download the data from the data logger and keep the wlk files up to date.
If you are thus letting WeatherLink maintain it's wlk files, you can also use another feature of VPLive that runs WeatherLink right before VPLive connects to the console. This is useful because then VPLive can initialize all its data accumulators (such as 24 hour rain) with data by reading the wlk files. Eventually I will have VPLive read the archive data directly from the console, but it does not have that capability yet.
If VPLive isn't configured to read data from a wlk file at startup, then the accumulators start out with no data. That means that VPLive will not start sending a 24 hour rain value to APRS until it has accumulated 24 hours of data, and it will not send the 1 hour rain until it has accumulated 1 hour of data.
But if VPLive can read the wlk file, it starts sending those values right when it starts.
Steve