Binary Store Update
Occasionally, we have to make format changes to the binary storage system. This is usually due to new features in some of the modules, but occasionally we also make changes to the main file structure.
We’ve done everything we can to keep PAMGuard backwards compatible with older versions, and are not aware of any backwards compatibility issues.
However, the Matlab, R, and Python libraries, that can read binary files are only maintained for the latest PAMGuard file versions.
If you’re using these libraries with old PAMGuard data, or a data that mixes old and new data file formats, you’re going to run into difficulties.
You can update all data for a PAMGuard project in Viewer mode so that’s it’s in the latest format and will be compatible with the external libraries.
Use the File > Binary Store > Update Old Binary Files … menu to open the update dialog.
This will show options to either overwrite existing data, or write data to a new folder, and a list of data outputs that use binary storage.
Select the options you want, and press Start. For most datasets, this will only take a few minutes. The first time you open the new dataset with PAMGuard Viewer, PAMGuard may need to recreate the Data Map, which will again take a few minutes.