About EV files

EV files are a powerful organization tool allowing you to combine data files for display and analysis purposes. You can create a single EV file containing all the data for a complete survey, an EV file for each transect of a survey, or an EV file for each day of a survey.

You are therefore free from any artificial limitations imposed by data logging software which tend to break continuous data up into separate files at (often inconvenient) times.

When a data file is added to an EV file the original data are not copied or modified in any way. Rather, the EV file stores pointers to the data along with the results of any edits that appear to be made to that data. This means that:

A single data file can be added to more than one EV file
EV files are relatively small and can be backed up independently of the data files
Data files can be stored separately from the EV files on read-only media such as CDs

There is no in-built limit to the number of data files or the total volume of data that can be added to a single EV file but the performance of Echoview will deteriorate if too many files are added. The number of data files that can be added to an EV file, without causing an unacceptable reduction in performance, will depend on the power of your computer hardware. In most cases EV files referring to 100s of megabytes of data will give reasonable performance.

Echoview supports templates and scripting to automate the creation of EV files with your preferred dataflows and workspace.

About EV files

See also