Occasionally, when diagnosing a problem, Linn Software support may request that you send your data_f folder contents to enable us to reproduce the specific problem. Some problems are very specific to the particular way a chart or some other object is defined. Please do not email your database to support unless support requests it. The data_f folder/directory contains 59 files that constitute the Investor/RT database. Since this folder's contents can often be hundreds of megabytes in size, sending the data_f by email is impossible, even after compressing the files. In some cases, the particular problem may be independent of the historical data stored in the database. In such cases, sending an "abbreviated data_f archive" will suffice. Here is a procedure for producing an abbreviated data_f archive.

Microsoft Windows Users:

1. Issue the command Control-->Database Utilities-->Archive Database
2. When prompted, assign a name to the archive file, usually archive.dba (dba stands for data base archive)
3. Send an email to support@linnsoft.com with the archive file as an attachment.

Macintosh OS X Users:

Until the Archive Database command is available in OS X versions of Investor/RT, use the manual procedure to create the archive file.

1. Quit Investor/RT
2. Make a New Folder on your desktop, name it archive_data_f
3. Open the data_f directory/folder within the Investor/RT director/folder
4. Display the data_f folder is list view and sort the file listing by "type"
5. Select all files of type .d01,.d02, and .d03 and copy those files into the archive_data_f. Be sure to COPY the files. DO NOT MOVE the files from the actual data_f folder.
6. Remove the files hist.d01 and tick.d01 from the archive_data_f folder. (These will typically be very large files and removing them is thus very important to reduce the size of the archive for emailing)
7. Compress the archive_data_f folder. On MS Windows, use WinZip. On Mac OS X, control-click or right-click on the folder and choose “Make Archive” to compress the folder. On Mac Classic, use Stuffit to compress the folder.
8. Send an email to support@linnsoft.com with the compressed archive file as an attachment.