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Old 29-05-2009, 11:55 AM
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Quark (Trevor)
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Lesson learned !!!!

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.

Cheers
Trevor
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  #2  
Old 29-05-2009, 12:00 PM
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h0ughy (David)
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might have to get a blue ray burner and back up on a blue ray disk Trevor - or get a few more Hdds
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Old 29-05-2009, 12:12 PM
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iceman (Mike)
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Yeh I don't back up enough.

I do zip up my planetary data. Ones in bad seeing I just throw away.

Planetary avi's zip up fairly well so make sure you're winzipping them.
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Old 29-05-2009, 12:55 PM
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Quark (Trevor)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by iceman View Post
Yeh I don't back up enough.

I do zip up my planetary data. Ones in bad seeing I just throw away.

Planetary avi's zip up fairly well so make sure you're winzipping them.
Thanks Mike, yes I also have been deleting the avi's that are to crook to glean any usefull scientific data from. However the seeing out here is generally good and the number of clear nights is high so I accumulate a lot of data. I will try Winzip to reduce the size of my avi's for storage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by h0ughy View Post
might have to get a blue ray burner and back up on a blue ray disk Trevor - or get a few more Hdds
Thanks Houghy, I suppose accidents happen, I think more Hdds are the go.
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Old 29-05-2009, 02:43 PM
gary
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Hi Trevor,

OfficeWorks are advertising external 1TB Maxtor drives for all but AUD164.
Recommend you buy a few to backup with. Rotate them now and then
to a secure site or fireproof cabinet.

Best Regards

Gary
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Old 29-05-2009, 04:03 PM
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leinad (Dan)
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Maybe looks at setting up a RAID Array of drives or cheap NAS for redundancy?

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/sectio...tached_storage
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