Keeping 365 days of logs should not be a problem. The only issue is if the log indexes get corrupted and need to be rebuilt, this can happen if Iguana crashes.

When Iguana is restarted it will need time to scan the logs and rebuild the indexes. As a rough guide, assuming we have 365 days of logs at 1MB per day (365 MB total) it should only take a few minutes to rebuild the indexes on a basic PC with a single disk drive. On a machine with a fast disks (RAID, SAN etc) it will be much quicker. The Iguana 4 manual page Log Age and Logging Performance indicates that the indexes (metafiles) for 20GB of data were rebuilt in 15 minutes on a test machine.

So why do you need to keep logs for so long? Probably for legal reasons, so you may not need to track everything in the logs. This FAQ suggests some archiving alternatives, For legal reasons we need to record 7 years of messages, how can I do this?

Here are some alternatives

1. Keep seven years of Iguana logs. Not recommended.
2. Keep 60 days of logs and export and/or back them up regularly.
3. Use the Translator to archive data to a database. Probably the best long term solution.

Please contact us at support@interfaceware.com if you need further help.

1. Keep seven years of Iguana logs

The Iguana logs are not designed for archiving. At the very least you need to copy or backup the logs also (see 2 below). Also keeping long term logs will slow down log index rebuilds, see I need to keep 365 days of logs, how will it affect Iguana? You can use Iguana to view and search the logs when you need to investigate.

2. Keep 60 days of Iguana logs and export and/or back them up regularly

Keeping a shorter period of logs and archiving them regularly makes much more sense.

Simply archive the logs by copying the <log directory>\log\<YYYMMDD>.log files to another location. When you need to do investigation you can use an Iguana server to view the archived logs. If you use backup software to “copy” the files you may need to restore the files before you can view them (we suggest restoring to an alternate location, rather than directly to the Iguana default log directory). An advantage of this approach is that it can easily be combined with your Iguana backup and restore routine.

As an interim measure you could export logs manually from within Iguana. Simply filter the log entries (eg: date range + messages only) using the search criteria, and then export the logs.

3. Use the Translator to archive data to a database

The good news is that the code is going to be simpler than mapping your interfaces. Probably all you need to do is to save every message as a string in its original format. Because you are using the Translator you can customize the archive process to your own needs, filter messages, add timestamps/comments/etc, route messages from different channels to different databases and so on.