What is a servo press?

A servo press uses servo motors for precise force and position control during forming operations.

How do I calculate servo press tonnage?

Use our free tonnage calculator at servopress.club/tonnage-calculator.html

Servo drive parameter backup - what's your process?

bill_stampco

Just lost all our drive parameters when a tech accidentally reset the Yaskawa drive to factory defaults during troubleshooting. Took us 2 days to get the press running again because nobody had documented the tuned values.

Never again. What's your process for backing up servo drive parameters? Do you just write them down, export to USB, or something else?

We have 3 presses — 2 Yaskawa Sigma-7 and 1 Mitsubishi MR-J4. Looking for a practical approach that our maintenance guys will actually follow.

anna_plc

Cannot stress this enough. We had a Yaskawa drive fail on a Friday afternoon. No parameter backup. Took until Wednesday to get the press running again because we had to re-tune everything from scratch. Now we back up after every parameter change and store copies in 3 places: USB in the cabinet, network drive, and printed hardcopy.

raj_pm

We added drive parameter backup to our quarterly PM checklist. Also worth noting: some drives (Siemens S120 in particular) store parameters in the memory card, not the drive itself. If you replace the drive but keep the card, parameters transfer automatically. But if the card fails, you lose everything. Back up the card too.

mchen_servo

After losing parameters on a Fanuc drive and spending two days re-tuning, we built a pretty strict backup routine. Here is what works for us across three different drive brands.

Fanuc: Use FASSB backup through the CNC. Menu → System → Servo → Parameter backup. Saves to CF card. We also screenshot every parameter page with a phone — sounds dumb but it has saved us twice when the CF card was corrupted.

Yaskawa Sigma-7: SigmaWin+ has a one-click backup that saves the full parameter set as a .ysp file. We run this after every tuning change and email the file to a shared mailbox. The drive also has a parameter copy function between drives using the front panel — useful if you have a spare drive and want to clone settings without a laptop.

Siemens S120: raj_pm is right about the memory card. But also back up through STARTER or TIA Portal. The memory card is convenient until it fails, and they do fail. We had one go bad after 4 years — no warning, just corrupted. If we had not had the STARTER backup we would have been down for a week waiting for Siemens support to reconstruct the parameters.

General rule: back up to at least 2 different media, and test the restore procedure once a year. A backup you have never tested is not really a backup.

jim_apps

Want to add something to this that bit us hard: test your backups.

We had a beautiful backup routine — quarterly backups, three copies, everything labeled and dated. Then a Yaskawa drive failed and we went to restore from the .ysp file. File was corrupted. Tried the second copy — same file, same corruption (it was copied from the first). The printed hardcopy was from 6 months earlier, before a major re-tune.

Now our process includes a verification step: after every backup, we do a compare. On Yaskawa, SigmaWin+ has a parameter compare function — load the backup file and compare against the live drive. Every parameter should match. If even one doesn't, the backup is suspect.

For Siemens S120, we learned another lesson: the memory card backup includes the firmware version. If you replace a failed drive with a newer firmware revision (which happens — you can't always get the exact same firmware), the parameter file may not load cleanly. Some parameters get renamed or renumbered between firmware versions. We now keep a text export of all parameters alongside the binary backup. The text file is human-readable and can be manually re-entered on any firmware version.

Fanuc-specific gotcha: the FASSB backup saves servo parameters but NOT the PMC (ladder) parameters. If your press has custom PMC logic for die protection, tonnage monitoring, or recipe management, that's a separate backup through the PMC menu. We lost our custom die protection logic once because we thought the servo backup covered everything.

Our current backup schedule:
- After any parameter change: immediate backup + compare
- Monthly: full backup of all drives, PLC, HMI recipes
- Quarterly: test restore on a bench drive (we keep one spare drive per brand specifically for this)
- Annually: full system image including PLC program, HMI configuration, network settings, and drive parameters

The bench drive for test restores costs about $2-3K per brand. Sounds expensive until you compare it to 3 days of downtime because your backup was bad.