Automating Backups

benedmunds

Hello to all.

I have a question and I hope someone here can help me.

I work at a plant with a little over 100 ABB robots.  I need a way to automate the backups on my S4C+ systems...

We have the robots set to automatically backup everytime the robot is switched from automatic to manual.  So I was thinking about a script that would FTP into each robot and copy the directory if it existed.  I use VB6 but I couldn't get this to work.  If it couldn't communicate to the robot it would crash...

Has anyone ever tried this before?  Can you help me?


Thank you,
-Ben Edmunds

Bryan

Hi Ben,

This sounds feasible.  You probably don't have a problem on the robot side.  It is probably how you are trying to access the FTP site.  Try using your VB code to down load files from some other FTP site on the web.  Then, when you get that going, switch to using the ABB controller's site.

Bryan

benedmunds

Sorry it took so long to reply.

Is there a way to force the robot to do a backup?

I could FTP in and modify a txt file; but then is there a way to read the file in RAPID and create a backup?

Don't know if this is possible...

-Ben

John Wiberg

Hi

I have been involved in several support cases where FTP scripts have hung/crashed the robot controller so be careful with security when doing those. (Don't try to FTP copy a module that is in use for instance... unless you like to reinstall the Basware )

On the other hand ABB has a product called WebWare System Developers Kit (WWSDK) that is used to develop Visual Studio applications (like VB) for communication with S4C+ robots. By using the WWSDK ActiveX components you can easily handle backups & file copy.

Then there is also the WebWare Server and S4Online products that will handle scheduled backups for S4C+ robots without any application development...

Bryan

I agree with John.  WebWare SDK is the way to go, if you have the money to invest.  It is easy to program from VB and very reliable for backups.  Plus you'll gain access to all kinds of other stuff like IO status, execution status, RAPID PERS values, etc.  Talk to your sales representative about it.

benedmunds

I will definately check out the WebWare SDK.

Thanks for the help guys!


-Ben