Ecoinvent 3.4 database zolca files taking forever to install

Question

I have purchased the Ecoinvent database 3.4 and tried importing it using the options import entire database using the zolca file and the restore databse option. But for both options the dialog box keeps d=showing that it is being imported however even after 12 hours the import wasnt complete. Does it take this long for the import? Or is the way i am importing the database wrong.

Comments

I have not heard about this problem before. Have a you tried a newer version of openLCA e.g. 1.7.4?

Answer 1

Hi, hopefully your problem is solved but as this seems to come up for a few people, this might help others as we had a similar problem (after running overnight it still hadn't completed the restore).

It turned out that the cause was insufficient hard drive space on the laptop. In our case, it was actually that there was insufficient space in the user area that oLCA was trying to put the database in by default so it was easy to fix by changing this folder (other instructions on this forum).

The .zolca for Ecoinvent LCI databases are each <2GB. However, when "restored", they need around 7-8GB of HDD space (in addition to the 500MB for the program and the 2GB for the zolca).

Answer 2

I would propose to close this - import entire database can take long depending on the speed of your hard disc and on the database you import into; on my computer (with SSD) for the unit process ei 3.5 database import into another unit process based database of similar size, maybe 5 minutes; for the system process databases, longer. HOWEVER, you only need to restore the database which takes maybe a minute or so (again, depending on your hard disc) to be able to work with it. Only the merging of databases, which is done via "import entire database", takes time.