Kaushal Shriyan wrote:
>"When new data reaches the starting point, it overwrites existing data" Does 
>it mean the existing data is lost?
> so how do i keep track of the historical data if it overwrites?

Please help me understand with examples.

Yes, once you have filled the buffer, the oldest data is overwritten and is 
lost - forever. So you need to size the buffers to suit your needs.
But typically, most people don't need to keep *ALL* the data for ever. Take an 
example I use RRD for a lot at work - storing network traffic data.

I generally only need high resolution data for a short time. After a couple of 
days I'm generally not interested in the finme detail of traffic patterns, only 
the max and average rates. By the time I'm out to a year ago, I only really 
need an overview.
So I collect data in RRDs with a 5 minute step size, and have aggregations of: 
5 minutes for 2 days, 1/2 hour for 2 weeks, 2 hours for 2 months, and 1 day for 
2 years. So for the last day or two I can see detail, for last wekk I can see 
less detail (1/2 hour aggregated steps), and for last year I can only see daily 
values.

For another RRD, I collect data every second and populate an RRD that 
aggregates at 5 second intervals for 3 hours, and 1 minute intervals for one 
day. This gives us a fairly fine grained view of network traffic - so if 
someone shouts "the internet's slow" we can look at this graph and see what the 
traffic is doing almost real time. But we don't need this level of detail going 
back more than an hour so we don't bother storing it.

But the main thing is that you need to decide what your requirements are - they 
will almost certainly be different to every one else's.
If you want to store 5 second samples for 10 years, I imagine RRD tools will 
handle it if you have the storage space, memory, and processor capacity to 
handle it. Storing data is fairly easy - it just needs disk space. But 
processing it (eg to draw a graph) will be quite resource intensive if you had 
to condense (say) a years worth of 5 second samples down to a 400 pixel wide 
graph. That's the reason for the aggregation - if all you're interested in for 
graphine over the previous year is daily averages, then consolidate the data 
and save storage space and resources needed to graph it.

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