Quark
29-05-2009, 11:55 AM
Hi all,
I am sure all here that are into astrophotography backup their data.
It is pretty obvious, that in this digital world we all should backup any important data. I thought I had learned this lesson a few years ago when my computer died just as I was putting the finishing touches to my project for the final unit of my uni degree in astronomy, I made the fatal mistake of letting the smoke out of my computer.
It is a very bad thing, indeed, to let the smoke out.
On that occasion I was extremely fortunate, it was only the power supply that had cooked and I was back in business in about 3 hours.
Since that experience I have religiously backed up my data on satellite drives, separate from my computer.
Although my laptop has 640 GB of storage, all of my planetary imaging with my DMK is captured directly onto satellite drives. I have filled a 320 GB drive with my Saturn data from 2008 and from mid Jan 2009 started with a new 350 GB satellite drive.
Yesterday my 350 GB drive accidentally fell off of the table it was on, onto the concrete floor, a drop of just 49 cm. It still seems to fire up but my computer no longer detects it. I have taken it to my local computer store where they will try and recover the data onto a new 1 TB drive.
If my data cannot be recovered then about 200 GB of avi's, mainly of storm structure on Saturn will be lost. The images I create from this data I supply to the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
I suppose there is a limit to how far we go to backup data, with the size of the avi's I produce it is really not practical to burn all of it onto CD's or DVD's.
I will have to be more careful, I think and maybe burn my very best data when the seeing is excellent onto DVD's.
I am sure others here have had similar disasters.
:shrug:
Cheers
Trevor
I am sure all here that are into astrophotography backup their data.
It is pretty obvious, that in this digital world we all should backup any important data. I thought I had learned this lesson a few years ago when my computer died just as I was putting the finishing touches to my project for the final unit of my uni degree in astronomy, I made the fatal mistake of letting the smoke out of my computer.
It is a very bad thing, indeed, to let the smoke out.
On that occasion I was extremely fortunate, it was only the power supply that had cooked and I was back in business in about 3 hours.
Since that experience I have religiously backed up my data on satellite drives, separate from my computer.
Although my laptop has 640 GB of storage, all of my planetary imaging with my DMK is captured directly onto satellite drives. I have filled a 320 GB drive with my Saturn data from 2008 and from mid Jan 2009 started with a new 350 GB satellite drive.
Yesterday my 350 GB drive accidentally fell off of the table it was on, onto the concrete floor, a drop of just 49 cm. It still seems to fire up but my computer no longer detects it. I have taken it to my local computer store where they will try and recover the data onto a new 1 TB drive.
If my data cannot be recovered then about 200 GB of avi's, mainly of storm structure on Saturn will be lost. The images I create from this data I supply to the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
I suppose there is a limit to how far we go to backup data, with the size of the avi's I produce it is really not practical to burn all of it onto CD's or DVD's.
I will have to be more careful, I think and maybe burn my very best data when the seeing is excellent onto DVD's.
I am sure others here have had similar disasters.
:shrug:
Cheers
Trevor