The invention provides a large scale distributed data acquisition system and method based on an industrial process. The system comprises multiple groups of field equipment, multiple field control stations, a data acquisition scheduling module, multiple data acquisition clients, and multiple databases. The data acquisition scheduling module distributes data acquisition tasks for the multiple data acquisition clients according to field control station operation state information, data acquisition client operation state information, a data acquisition period, and data items needing to be collected. The data acquisition clients are used for setting the data acquisition period, the data items needing to be collected and a data acquisition client operation state threshold and storing the collected data into the databases. The multiple databases store the data collected by the multiple data acquisition clients. According to the system and the method, the data items and the data acquisition period can be set according to the needs of a user, and the system and the method have the advantages of high fault tolerance, high reliability, easy use and scalability.