Investor/RT has long featured automated backfill at startup, designed to backfill historical data since the date/time that the data feed was last stopped. Starting with version 11.2, backfill is now automatic and has been enhanced to fill in any historical data per symbol for all trading that has occurred since the last trade recorded in the local database. In prior releases, Setup: Preferences: Backfill allowed user control on whether to auto backill or not and whether to auto backfill all intra-day symbols or just those open in charts. Version 11.2 eliminates these choices and performs all necessary backfill on all symbols that the user has marked for intra-day data retention. The new backfill automation does what is necessary to ensure that all intra-day symbols historical data will be complete and up-to-date each time you start the program and connect to your data source.
Improvements have also been made to automate historical data management. For example, a symbol setup to retain, say, 30 days of intra-day data may be charted using a chart setup that calls for say 100 days of data. Investor/RT will recognize situations like this and automatically download the extra data needed to fill the chart request and automatically adjust the setup of the symbol to retain that newly downloaded data. In the event that a chart calls for a static begin date/time, data is downloaded back to that begin date and the symbol is automatically setup to "Retain All 1-Min Data". This option to retain all 1-minute data is new in version 11.2. When this option is in effect for a particular symbol, the 1-minute data for the symbol will be retained, unlike other symbols whose data is trimmed each day to retain only a fixed number of days on the local historical database. While this is not recommended, you may opt out of this chart driven backfill and automatic retention setup, by setting configuration variable DataRetentionAutomationto false in Setup: Configuration.
The improved automation of historical data management will be a welcome improvement for the vast majority of Investor/RT users. Nevertheless, we recognize that some users, perhaps those who track many hundreds of intra-day symbols, may wish to opt out of these improvements in order to exert more control over when data is downloaded. This can be accomplished by going to Setup: Configuration and setting the variable BackfillAutomation to false. Doing so will enable Setup: Preferences: Backfill to be used to manually control the auto fill process as in prior releases.