Deleted experiment cache

Including End/Delete Experiment options has been a game changer to take-out all the Pioreactors at once, and remove any unnecessary experiments. However, if a new expriment is created with the same name as the deleted experiment, the previous experimental data of the deleted experiment also gets recovered in the experiment (at least the plot drawings come back). I do not know if this is done on purpose so that the users can recover the data again, but at the moment, in cases where I accidentally create an experiment or want to re-start the experiment, I have to rename the experiment slightly different (e.g., exp-1 instead of exp) so that I start with a fresh plot table.

Hence, I would like to suggest if one can implement archive option instead of delete, so to say, the users can pack-up unnecessary experiments, and can access to it whenever they want. Also this way, the archived experiment will not hinder the users from using the same experimental name, and in cases where they want to recover the archieve experiment, it can perhaps be re-named with the exptension -recovered to distinguish it from the main experiment.

I do not know how difficult it is to implement this idea, if it worths the effort or would be favoured by the other users. Hence, perhaps setting up a voting system alike setup would be beneficial for this category to weigh if the suggested improvements have demand by majority of the users.

Hence, perhaps setting up a voting system alike setup would be beneficial for this category to weigh if the suggested improvements have demand by majority of the users.

I encourage other readers to use the “Like” feature for that!

This is actually known bug, and something we will correct in the future. We avoided deleting data for two reasons:

  1. It’s can take a long time to delete large datasets from the database.
  2. It’s a small performance hit when we insert data into the database.

An option is to preserve data for a few days, and when we detect the cluster is not being used, we “vacuum” this old data. Or we just do the right thing and delete immediately.

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In the latest software images, the deletion of historical data accompanies the deletion of the experiment. This change won’t be made for existing images (it’s too risky to execute to requirements on existing databases).

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