The PlainPBStoragePlugin in the EPICS archiver appliance uses Google's ProtocolBuffers as the serialization mechanism. The PB definitions mapping EPICS DBR types to PB messages can be found in EPICSEvent.proto. PB files contain serialized PB messages; one per sample; a sample per line. The first line in a PB file is a header (PayloadInfo PB message) that contains some basic information like the PV name, its DBR type and so on.

As serialized PB messages are binary data; after serialization, newline characters are escaped to maintain a "sample per line" constraint.

1. The ASCII escape character 0x1B is escaped to the following two characters 0x1B 0x01
2. The ASCII newline character \n or 0x0A is escaped to the following two characters 0x1B 0x02
3. The ASCII carriage return character 0x0D is escaped to the following two characters 0x1B 0x03

Because of the sample per line constraint, one can use wc -l to determine the number of events in a PB file. The "sample per line" constraint also lets us determine where a sample begins and ends at any arbitrary location in the file.

PB files try to optimize on storage consumption. On an average, an EPICS DBR_DOUBLE/PB ScalarDouble consumes about 21 bytes per sample. To save space, the record processing timestamps in the samples are split into three parts

1. year - This is stored once in the PB file in the header.
2. secondsintoyear - This is stored with each sample.
3. nano - This is stored with each sample.

This leads to the side-effect that each PB file "belongs" to a year. In addition, the record processing timestamps are guaranteed to be and expected to be monotonically increasing. The "monotonically increasing timestamps" constraint lets us use various search algorithms on PB files without the need for an index. The PlainPBStoragePlugin handles the translation back and forth between DBR types and raw PB messages and also enforces a strict partitioning.

The installation bundle also includes some utilities that manipulate PB files. These can be found in the install/pbutils folder of the mgmt webapp. These include

1. printTimes.sh - This utility prints the record processing timestamps of all the samples in the set of specified PB files.
2. pb2json.sh - This utility prints all the data in all the samples in the set of specified PB files as JSON that can potentially be loaded into Python or other languages.
3. validate.sh - This utility performs some simple validation of the set of specified PB files or PB files in the specified folders.
4. repair.sh - This utility performs some simple validation of the set of specified PB files or PB files in the specified folders. If errors are found in a PB file, the PB file is repaired by copying the valid samples into a new file and then renaming it to the old file name. It also support an option to make a backup of the original file before attepmting to fix it.