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Thread 'Lost Work Unit!'

Thread 'Lost Work Unit!'

Message boards : Number crunching : Lost Work Unit!
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Profilemo.v
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Message 34457 - Posted: 1 Aug 2008, 12:00:57 UTC
Last modified: 1 Aug 2008, 12:01:22 UTC

That\'s really bad luck. For a newish member you were doing well to attempt to move the BOINC folder contents to another computer. Fortunately it was one of the relatively \'short\' models. You\'d have been even madder if you\'d reached 95% of a 160-year model, though most of its data would have been usable for the researchers anyway from the decadal zipped uploads.

If there\'s anything we can learn from your experience, it\'s this:

* Try never to delete the contents of a BOINC folder until you have two backups, preferably in different places and better still on different drives.

* Deleted BOINC folder contents can be successfully restored from the Recycle bin/Trash, so don\'t empty that until the entire transfer process is completed with BOINC + tasks up and running everywhere you want them.

* If you\'re in a mess and have the contents of two BOINC folders in Trash with all the files & folders mixed up, you can usually still recognise what belongs to which package by time of deletion and can selectively restore one package file by file.

When hardware fails, some of what I\'ve said will just be pie in the sky.

It\'s a good idea for anyone who can afford it to invest in an external hard drive and keep it physically disconnected when not in use. The price of these has come down and the same external drive can store backups from more than one computer.

Better luck with your next flash drive!
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ProfileIain Inglis
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Message 43588 - Posted: 21 Dec 2011, 22:23:46 UTC

The administration of work units is automated. The project doesn't expect all models within a work unit to complete nor does it even rely on any model within a work unit completing - the analysis is statistical. So there's no manual intervention except where a complete batch is bad for some reason and the whole batch needs to be cancelled.

There have been completions on that machine. What do you think the problem is for these two models?
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Les Bayliss
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Message 43598 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 18:16:13 UTC - in response to Message 43596.  

It's well known that flash drives have a limited number of write/read cycles. They were intended to be a replacement for floppy disks, not hard drives.


Backups: Here
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Message boards : Number crunching : Lost Work Unit!

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