Datafiles

The year of the football season (e.g, 2006)

Conference data - name, level, divisions, etc.

Team data - name, nickname, division, games, etc.

Game data - opponents, dates, times, TV schedules, scores

Poll, BCS & FBR data - date, teams, points, rank, etc.

Datafiles have the filename extension .fbd (football data). FBR stores these files in a subdirectory below the application directory named "Data" (see File directory structure). The program will only read and write datafiles to this directory. FBR will save your data automatically whenever you close the application or load a different datafile. If you need to close a file without saving your changes, select File | Close without saving from the main menu.

During the college football season, an updated datafile for the current season will be available for download the day after every game day. Also, once the voter polls and BCS rankings are available, the datafile will again be updated and posted on the web site.

Please report any data errors you find - especially scores. The rankings and analysis are only as good as the data, so any corrections from you will be appreciated.

data@FootballRankulator.com

You are encouraged to back up your datafiles to a floppy disk, zip drive, etc.; especially if you are entering your own data.

Football Rankulator does do some automatic backups for you in case you need to revert to an earlier state of your data.

Under the "Data" subdirectory there is another subdirectory named "Backup." Daily backups are stored here. Here there are 3 session backups for each datafile. They have the same filename as the datafile, but have the following extensions: ~fbd1, ~fbd2, & ~fbd3. If you ever need to go back to one of these files, save the datafile in question, then rename one of the files so it has the extension .fbd, then move it back up to the \Data directory.

When you load a datafile, a one time backup of that datafile is made for that day - it is also stored in the \Data\Backup.  The filenames will have a format of <filename>.YY-MM-DD.bak. If you need to restore one of these datafiles, rename it to <filename>.fbd and copy it to the "Data" directory.