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ings that seem straight out of the ’90s. And guess what? Flat file drops are one of them. You’d think by now, everyone would be using modern APIs, but no… sometimes we get stuck with flat files.

Why? Because sometimes.. it’s free (our favorite word). 💸

This is the exact situation we found ourselves in during one of our recent projects. The vendor was adamant that the free method they’d support for syncing data was continuously overwritten flat file drops. No fancy REST API, no real-time database hooks. Just good ol’ file drops. And while we weren’t about to pay extra for modern connectivity, it did leave us with one tiny issue: How do we track changes and not lose historical data if files are constantly overwritten? 😩

Enter Time Stamper. 🎩✨

What Does Time Stamper Do? 🕰️

At its core, Time Stamper is our makeshift, but totally functional, solution to the problem of constantly overwritten files. Here’s how it works:

  1. Archiving Flat Files: Every time the vendor drops a new version of the file (and overwrites the previous one), Time Stamper steps in and says, “Not on my watch!” Instead of letting the file disappear into the void, it copies the file to a separate directory, appends a timestamp to the filename, and keeps a lovely archive of each version.
  2. Logging the Magic: It also logs all of its heroic actions. That way, you can keep track of what happened, when it happened, and feel that sweet, sweet satisfaction of knowing your data is safe. 📝

Putting Time Stamper to Work ⚙️

So, you’ve got your shiny new Time Stamper script—what’s next? Well, it’s simple: you set it up to run at regular intervals, capturing those flat file updates. You can do this by adding it to your crontab on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows. Time Stamper will dutifully check for file changes and save those with the appropriate timestamp.

This way, even if your backend system goes down (hey, it happens 🙈), Time Stamper’s archives allow you to catch up when you’re back online. You’ll be able to cycle through the output files in the archive, based on their timestamps, ensuring you know exactly which updates were missed or processed. It’s like time travel… but for flat files. 🚀

Time Stamper in Action: How It Fits into Your Workflow 📂

Once you’ve got Time Stamper running on a schedule, you can use whatever framework or backend you’re working with to drive your database updates. The key here is that Time Stamper is operating at a higher level (crontab) so all newly received files will still be captured. In this way Time Stampers acts like a safety net, making sure no update gets lost even if things go sideways. Once your system recovers have the system run through the updates that it’s missed since it went down.

  • Miss an update? Just check the archive and process the file with the latest timestamp.
  • Need to replay updates? Simply loop through the files chronologically and apply them to your database.
  • Backend crash? No worries, Time Stamper has your back with a detailed history of what you missed while you were offline.

This is where Time Stamper becomes more than just a flat-file-archiving tool—it’s a way to keep your systems in sync, even when your primary processes falter.

The Beauty of Simple Solutions ✨

Is Time Stamper the most elegant solution ever created? Absolutely not and I am aware of the cost of free – but here’s the thing: sometimes a simply quick solution emerges. I hope this helps someone else in a budget – it’s free, gets the job done, and saves you from losing your mind over THIS flat file problem. 😎

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