Data Issues

How should I arrange my Snap-Plus data?

Each Snap-Plus database holds data for one or more separate farms. For manure management purposes, a farm is defined in Snap-Plus as a set of fields that share manure sources. However the program is quite flexibile in how you choose to define a farm. For instance, fields can be grouped with a "sub-farm" designation if you have a large operation that includes several different smaller farms. Each Snap-Plus database is intended to hold the entire yearly history of its farms, so there is no need to create new farms or databases each year. You will make a lot more work for yourself if you do.

You can create Snap-Plus databases anywhere on your hard drive or even on an external USB flash memory drive. It just needs to be on a writeable medium (i.e. not a CD). However there are two things to think about when creating databases.

Firstly, performance is an issue for Snap-Plus, and reading and writing to and from disk can be a part of that performance bottleneck. Your internal hard drive will generally have the fastest access to your Snap-Plus data.

Secondly, you will want to back up your Snap-Plus data after you have added to it, and this will be much easier if your databases are grouped together rather than being scattered all over. Snap-Plus provides a default folder called "MySnapPlusData" where you can group your databases to provide easy access for backups. Note that Snap-Plus upgrades will not delete your existing data, but just the same, it is always safer to do a backup before upgrading.