Hubitat keeps deleting data against my will

[gcooka]

Hi, I realized a few weeks ago that Hubitat set the maximum age of device data to 31 days, without any apparent ability to change that value. So I figured I'd make a Rule to write changed data to a .csv file on the hub, and access that as needed. Now I come to find out that Hubitat is arbitrarily deleting or truncating my .csv file, even though there is no delete action in my rule. I happened to find a log entry that shows the Rule Machine at one point tried to delete it and encountered an error. I want Rule Machine to NOT randomly delete my file whenever it feels like it. This seems like something that needs to be fixed. Here is my Rule and log entry I found from earlier today; I have not changed this rule in several weeks:

[thebearmay]

To do the Append I believe RM reads the file into memory, adds the new data to the memory copy, deletes the old file and then writes a new file with the same name from the data in memory.

[bravenel]

@thebearmay

RM reads the file into memory, adds the new data to the memory copy, deletes the old file and then writes a new file with the same name from the data in memory.

Not quite. It does read the file into memory, then writes the file back with the appended string. Not a new file, and no deletion.

[neonturbo]

@gcooka

31 days, without any apparent ability to change that value.

There is a way, but you should use extreme caution when changing things like this. This number was set a certain way to manage hub free memory, and how many read/writes you make to the memory card. You could introduce unintended consequences by changing things, I am not endorsing doing this, but the info is out there on the forum.

That said, the linked thread below should have the settings you want. In particular, I think you are wanting max Event Age Days?
Possible slow down problem with 2.3.0.124? - #108 by tony.fleisher

[gcooka]

Yes that is exactly what I needed, thanks! I set the global max age of 365 and then set low event count limits on all but the sensors I need long history for.

[neonturbo]

@gcooka

I set the global max age of 365

Well, you just did what I warned you not to, good luck!

[Rxich]

you could feed into nodered and keep the data as long as you'd like, and avoid a possible hub slowdown

[aaiyar]

@Rxich

you could feed into nodered

Or anything else. InfluxDB, with visualization using Grafana, is a popular choice:

Hubitat + InfluxDB + Grafana Howto [Ubuntu Linux]

I was searching for a decent howto on graphing sensor data captured by Hubitat, but found a variety of old and outdated and partial conversations on the topic, but nothing that shows you how to get from nothing to a graph in one place. Here's my attempt to do that for others in the same boat. Note I'm not an expert on these things as I just got them working myself, but that also means that this process does work as of today. This will be based on my configuration, but it should be similar for…

[gcooka]

These are all very helpful, thank you. For now I will wait and see what effect this has on the hub, if any. I have only a small number of sensors from which I am wanting long-term data. It is difficult for me to imagine how the age of the data matters any more than its quantity or capture rate.