By Anonymous on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 09:47 am:
Hi, I am a grad student and will be running a remote chrom lab later this summer with 3 HP1100s and a GC, 5690. We will be processing enviromental samples and will have only one shot a collecting this data. I would hate if if a hard drive crash killed our work. We will be in a trailer and will not have IT support. Agilent solutions seem more geared for pharma companies than grad students. Any suggetions appreciated.
By juddc on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 12:57 pm:
I don't think you need a big IT solution for this - simply back up your data from each machine on a daily basis - or even every few hours - on a reliable medium (recordable CD-ROM comes to mind) and don't sweat it too much. If you're really neurotic, you can also print each chromatogram as it is acquired and processed, and as long as your trailer doesn't burn down, you'll have something to work with. I don't know Chemstation's most current backup protocols and options per-se (I'm a Waters devotee), but I'd be really surprised if you couldn't do a backup directly to a Zip drive, recordable CD, and so forth.
By Tom Mizukami on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 02:55 pm:
Anon,
I don't know how remote is remote, but I agree with juddc - keep it simple. Stay away from the database solutions. ChemStation files are flat files and can be archived directly to CDROM or CDRW.
Another option is to install IDE RAID card into each computer and mirror the hard drives. I know Promise Technologies make these and you can probably pick them up on the internet for about $50. IBM hardrives are probably the best 80GB IDE drives right now and will cost <$100 at Fry's. Just bring an extra drive incase one fails and then you don't have to be paranoid about daily backups.
If you are going to run a mini network for a print server etc. Then you could use a program like DataKeeper from PowerQuest or ArcServe. Agilent's ChemAccess was built on top of ArcServe. These programs will automatically copy files from any directory or drive to a network location. You could then archive to CDROM all the data from this one location. DataKeeper comes with DriveImage. Version 4.0 will cost you about $15 on E-bay.
Good luck and feel free to e-mail me if you need any help with configuring your setup.
P.S. version A.06.04 of ChemStaion is stable for normal operation. Stay away from the 7 series. I heard 08.03 is stable again.
By Chemstation user on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 04:46 pm:
Don't be so paranoid about hard drives crashing. Zip, writeable CD relatively inexpensive. Back up data directories, methods, and sequences; you'll need all three to recreate and reprocess the data. - Chemstation user
By Anonymous on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 09:41 pm:
I know I am being paranoid, but there has been about three years of work leading up to this. Plus, Murphy is my best friend.
Tom, I have "acquired" a Snap server with built in print server functionality, will this work. I think it is set up for RAID 5. I will set it up tomorrow and post again.
By lcguy1 on Thursday, June 27, 2002 - 10:00 am:
I think you could just have your data go directly to a cd-r instead of the hard drive. That way, if the HDD dies, which happens frequently on the kayak PC's with quantum drives,(we had 2 of them die last week),your data would be on the cd and safe. Just an idea.
By Anonymous on Monday, July 1, 2002 - 08:05 am:
Tom: Thanks for answering my e-mails. I got the network set up and all of the local hpchem directories are being kept sync'd with a copy on the Snap server using DataKeeper. I'm sleeping better already, thanks again.
Everyone: Thanks for your posts and your thoughts. I don't think I can write directly to CDR. ChemStation requires a data directory and my CD-R recording software does not direct writes like it was a hard drive.
By Anonymous on Monday, July 1, 2002 - 11:20 am:
With Adaptec software, one can pre-format a CD in the Direct CD format, then copying files to it is as simple as writing to a hard drive or floppy. that might be worth a try, Adaptec is a major player in CD writer software.
By Anonymous on Saturday, July 20, 2002 - 01:46 pm:
Just a small point to be aware of - Chemstation data is stored in sub-directories and is actually a collection of files rather than a single file. The sub-directory name can be based on a name you enter in the sequence programming section (or the method section if you only make single runs)and the directory name extension is simply .d - make sure you backup the complete .d subdirectory to ensure that you are able to reload and reprocess the data. Chemstation A.08.03 is basically stable except for the random (and fairly rare) HPCORE errors.