|
|
| Backing up and archiving NMR spectra We make an archive copy of all data on the spectrometers once every three months. But we highly recommend that users make frequent backups of their own data. There are several convenient ways to do this:
For security, the NMR spectrometer host computers and processing stations are not directly accessible from the Internet and/or operate behind firewalls. As a result, you need to make your backups on one of our computers. Where's my (Bruker) data? When you create a new spectrum (with the "new" command) in xwinnmr, you are creating a directory (folder) that the data resides in. The location of this directory depends on user entries in the "new" dialog box. There are six fields in "new," listed in the order NAME, EXPNO, PROCNO, DU, USER, TYPE; the full path to the data uses them in the following order: /DU/data/USER/TYPE/NAME/EXPNO/PROCNO At the very least, the name of the data directory (which comes from the NAME field in "new") must be compliant with UNIX file naming rules in order to work. This means no spaces in the name, and some punctuation marks (notably ~, / , \, ', or a leading -) cannot be used. However, not all valid UNIX file names are valid in the ISO 9660 standard used for CD's. Basically filenames that stick with the old DOS "eight and three" standard (no more than 8 characters, a period, no more than three characters) will be safe. Directories with invalid file names are automatically renamed when we make the CD archives. Unfortunately, the new names aren't very informative, so at the very least, it will be harder to identify the renamed files; it will make it impossible to use search tools to find a specific file by its former name. We do allow "long" file names in our archives (without this, the number of invalid names would be extremely large). The following UNIX-valid file naming techniques are certain to cause problems: -using multiple periods in a file name (like one.two.three) -using mixed upper and lower case letters in a file name (DOS internally represents all letters as upper case) Two of the fields in the "new" dialog should NEVER be changed: the DU (set by default to /u) and TYPE (set to nmr) fields. If you change these, you will not be able to find your data from within xwinnmr using the "search" command, It will also not be archived. It will still be present on the system, but if you can't see where it is, it is as good as lost. The USER field can be changed by the user, but you should do so only with an understanding of the results. This field defaults to "guest" whenever a new account is created. We generally change this field to be the same as your UNIX user name when we configure a new user account. You can put different entries in there (say, to organize your data among different projects) but each time you put a new value in this box, you create a new directory tree for it. If you do this more or less at random, then your data files will be scattered around the data directory more or less at random, too, making them much harder to track down later. The setting you used for USER does not appear anywhere on your plotted spectrum. Either you use the same value every time, or you keep track of what values you use and can reconstruct where you would have put a particular spectrum, or you write it down ... or if none of the above, you may encounter some serious hassles trying to find the data later. In particular, you do not want to use USER values with varying cases. To UNIX, dave, Dave, and DAVE are all different and all valid. But when we make CD's, they are all considered to be identical, and therefore conflicting. Data less than six months old should be available on the system's disk drive. However, we strongly recommend you make backups of all your own spectra promptly, because we do not back up every user-created file. Zip disks, CD/R or CD/RW disks can be used for this purpose. If you use a Zip disk for backups, do not drop and drag the data folder icon to or from the zip directory window. If you drop and drag from the data directory to the zip window, you will have a backup, but the original copy is deleted from the hard drive. If you do that, the file will never show up in our archives (since you have deleted it from the system and there is nothing for us to archive). Dropping and dragging files onto the system creates problems because the copies are owned by the root user. Instead of dropping and dragging, open a UNIX shell and use the UNIX cp (copy) command. With the Zip disk in the drive and mounted (the zip icon shows either an "A" or an apple), type cd /u/data/[user]/nmr ... where [user] is whatever you put in for USER (this changes the directory to the data directory) If you want, you can see a full list of your available spectra by typing ls (list). ls -l gives full details; ls -lt puts them in date order rather than alphabetical order. cp -r [name] /zip ... where [name] is whatever you put in for the NAME (this recursively copies the data directory) This creates a backup copy on the Zip disk and leaves the file in place, where you can access it without using the Zip, and where we can archive it. To eject the Zip disk, left click on the zip icon to highlight it, then right click on the zip icon and choose Eject Zip. Separate instructions for using Nero to made CD-R backups can
be found here. |
Please send questions or comments concerning this website to Monique D. Pilch. Copyright © 2003 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory |