[nick.l.thomas]

I am looking for feedback and suggestions on the way I'm currently exporting transient data. I am analyzing flow over rotating cylinders and want primarily to retain pressure, velocity in stn frame, vorticity, and lift and drag coefficient data.
In Pre I am set to output cgns and trn files every .2s, although the cgns from this proved to be difficult to use since it only exports surface data. My batch code currently has the following:

cfx5solve to export the .trn

cfx5export to export .cgns for the entire domain every .2s. -user "3" to output the third level of data, including vorticity which I need

cfx5mondata to export lift and drag coefficient data (monitors) to a .csv

I feel that I'm being very inefficient as I wind up with very large amounts of data simply trying to get a few variables. I'm importing all the .cgns files to Tecplot at once to get the animations and contours, which takes a lot of time (maybe necessary?). And I wind up with a million parameters I don't want or need (from the "-user "3"" command to get vorticity data).

I also still don't fully understand the need for .trn files. From what I read they are essentially backup files for transient runs that are used for restarts - but can't a restart be done simply using the .res file?

I'm pretty new to using batch code and getting transient results with CFD so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but any advice for simplifying this process while still getting the results I need?