On the night of June 21[winter solstice down in these parts] a fault in the power line coming into my home resulted in power surge followed by a voltage drop to 160V AC. [Supply is 240V in these parts]. Every plugged in was immediately fried [hot water, fridge, dis washer, hifi, computers, disk drives]. This included all my astroimages. From the original sub-frames to the final processed images. All calibration and all light frames. Although my observatory is powered by batteries, all my batteries were fried too as there were on charge. Fortunately I was insured and the insurance company [and the loss adjuster appointed] has been very helpful. The financial claim has already been settled, even if the power company won't talk to me. Nevertheless, I consider my biggest stroke of good luck/planing is my Astrobin archive. When I started out in this hobby, I decided to put every DSO I imaged on AB - regardless of how good/bad it was. My original motivation was to be instructive to both myself and my Astrobin friends, but now I find that decision has allowed me to recover processed version of al my images. Sure, I can go back a re-process data any longer, but I had already mined that out when RCAstro tools came out. The biggest loss is the 200+ fields I had imaged for the ABC survey. Although I had backed up all of them to DropBox, the original files I was planned to re-process to correct an earlier error have gone. Not that it needs saying, but perhaps a "lived" example of the wonderful archival resource that Astrobin provides our hobby. Thank you, @Salvatore Iovene |
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I pour my heart and soul into AstroBin for long hours every single day. I'm pretty sure I can count the days I haven't written code on AstroBin on the fingers of my hands and feet, over the course of the last 14 years. I'm very happy to provide a good service to anyone! But remember that AstroBin is not a backup service. I do have a very solid backup strategy for all your data, and I consider it extremely unlikely that something gets lost these days. But there was one accident in 2020... 🤫 I learned a lot from that one tho  Thank you for the kind words Brian and I'm so sorry about your ABC survey data!
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PS: you're on Ultimate, so if you don't do it already, remember that you can upload an XISF from PixInsight to associate to your image. That should include all uncompressed data, all processes, change history, etc! If you store that on AstroBin, it's one more place that you can recover an image that you could process again.
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Brian Boyle:
On the night of June 21[winter solstice down in these parts] a fault in the power line coming into my home resulted in power surge followed by a voltage drop to 160V AC. [Supply is 240V in these parts].
Every plugged in was immediately fried [hot water, fridge, dis washer, hifi, computers, disk drives]. This included all my astroimages. From the original sub-frames to the final processed images. All calibration and all light frames. Although my observatory is powered by batteries, all my batteries were fried too as there were on charge.
Fortunately I was insured and the insurance company [and the loss adjuster appointed] has been very helpful. The financial claim has already been settled, even if the power company won't talk to me.
Nevertheless, I consider my biggest stroke of good luck/planing is my Astrobin archive. When I started out in this hobby, I decided to put every DSO I imaged on AB - regardless of how good/bad it was. My original motivation was to be instructive to both myself and my Astrobin friends, but now I find that decision has allowed me to recover processed version of al my images. Sure, I can go back a re-process data any longer, but I had already mined that out when RCAstro tools came out.
The biggest loss is the 200+ fields I had imaged for the ABC survey. Although I had backed up all of them to DropBox, the original files I was planned to re-process to correct an earlier error have gone.
Not that it needs saying, but perhaps a "lived" example of the wonderful archival resource that Astrobin provides our hobby. Thank you, @Salvatore Iovene People are divided into those who make backups and those who have not lost data yet. Sorry for that, I'm not trying to be rude, it's just truth. Regards, Martha
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It is sad to hear that you wen through that incident, no matter the insurance, it is not the same, compensations do not really compensate all your emotions and feelings of the whole process. I also believe that AB is a jolly good way to keep alive whatever we do, and I am glad to read that you also keep the files no matter if they are good, excelent or not.
Backup is sometimes possible (I refer to large amount of data), however if you want to be really safe for any event…it is hard and expensive.
All the best and cheers up, as one of my friends from Manchester used to say, with a good pint of sider in his hand!
Claudio
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Brian Boyle:
On the night of June 21[winter solstice down in these parts] a fault in the power line coming into my home resulted in power surge followed by a voltage drop to 160V AC. [Supply is 240V in these parts].
Every plugged in was immediately fried [hot water, fridge, dis washer, hifi, computers, disk drives]. This included all my astroimages. From the original sub-frames to the final processed images. All calibration and all light frames. Although my observatory is powered by batteries, all my batteries were fried too as there were on charge.
Fortunately I was insured and the insurance company [and the loss adjuster appointed] has been very helpful. The financial claim has already been settled, even if the power company won't talk to me.
Nevertheless, I consider my biggest stroke of good luck/planing is my Astrobin archive. When I started out in this hobby, I decided to put every DSO I imaged on AB - regardless of how good/bad it was. My original motivation was to be instructive to both myself and my Astrobin friends, but now I find that decision has allowed me to recover processed version of al my images. Sure, I can go back a re-process data any longer, but I had already mined that out when RCAstro tools came out.
The biggest loss is the 200+ fields I had imaged for the ABC survey. Although I had backed up all of them to DropBox, the original files I was planned to re-process to correct an earlier error have gone.
Not that it needs saying, but perhaps a "lived" example of the wonderful archival resource that Astrobin provides our hobby. Thank you, @Salvatore Iovene
People are divided into those who make backups and those who have not lost data yet.
Sorry for that, I'm not trying to be rude, it's just truth.
Regards,
Martha
Hi Martha, I did have a backup disk in the house. And it was fried too. I decided against buying cloud storage for my raw data, as it was simply too expensive for me. The decision not to have an off-site backup is certainly on me. As @Claudio Tenreiro says it is another expense in an already expensive hobby, and I didn't prioritise it. Brian
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Hi Brian,
Sorry to hear about your loss. I am curious if you have UPS or any surge protection devices? Obviously one can't put everything in the house behind such. But if such a thing really works, it may be worthwhile to to get one for at least the data storage.
Remote backup for everything is too expensive, as you said. So some protection to local backup drives is necessary.
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Hi Brian
Did you check with a data recovery expert. My 4GB data hard drive crashed, was totally dead–it was just vibrating, not spinning when I finally realized it had crashed while I was working from it. But I found a local guy who really knew his stuff. It took two days but I could not believe it, he recovered all of my files as far as I could see, and put them on a new hard drive. Not cheap, but well worth it.
CS
Rick
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Rick Veregin:
Hi Brian
Did you check with a data recovery expert. My 4GB data hard drive crashed, was totally dead--it was just vibrating, not spinning when I finally realized it had crashed while I was working from it. But I found a local guy who really knew his stuff. It took two days but I could not believe it, he recovered all of my files as far as I could see, and put them on a new hard drive. Not cheap, but well worth it.
CS
Rick Hi Rick, Great idea. I did try locally with no luck. However, my locally is Queenstown which is great for adventure sports but a lot less good for tech. I have kept the "dead" drives, so the next time I head to Sydney I might have more luck. Thanks Brian
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Wei-Hao Wang:
Hi Brian,
Sorry to hear about your loss. I am curious if you have UPS or any surge protection devices? Obviously one can't put everything in the house behind such. But if such a thing really works, it may be worthwhile to to get one for at least the data storage.
Remote backup for everything is too expensive, as you said. So some protection to local backup drives is necessary. Hi Wei-Hao, Good suggestion. In this case my sparky told me that surge protection would have been no use. It was the voltage drop that killed everything. Unfortunately the power company won't answer my calls - they say it is a matter between themselves and the insurer. But I would like to know whether this is something I can mitigate against in the future. Howeever, my Sparky says he has never seen anytihng like this in 30+ on the job. So, perhaps like the May 11 aurora, a once in a generation thing. And the power company's name...... Aurora energy. Brian
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This could be the 'worst case scenario'. What a crazy story. It's making me want to re-evaluate my back up strategy. Maybe some offline storage on some mass media devices, like a WD External Hard drive. I'm running out of space currently, even on my NAS. Hmmmm….
On a side note, I do kinda feel your pain. Our business just got struck by lightning about 2 weeks ago now. It took out pretty much everything electronic, save for the computers themselves. All networking devices, fire panel, door mag locks, security cameras… the bill is massive and still going up. These were all behind surge protection too. Thank god for insurance.
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Brian Boyle:
As @Claudio Tenreiro says it is another expense in an already expensive hobby, and I didn't prioritise it.
Brian I'm sorry again, but I have to say it: If you buy a nice car, which is expensive, do you pay insurance for it, which is also expensive? I have a NAS drive which works all the time for my convenience. But I also have a simple but capacious USB drive which is connected ONLY when I perform the backup. Usually, I do one backup using the USB drive per 4-5 backups done with the NAS. Good luck. Martha
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I have a NAS drive which works all the time for my convenience. But I also have a simple but capacious USB drive which is connected ONLY when I perform the backup. Usually, I do one backup using the USB drive per 4-5 backups done with the NAS.
Good luck.
Martha Very good example of 3-2-1 backup strategy!
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