The suggestion over at MalariaControl was to have a backup/recovery feature added to the client to prevent data loss.

Now I realise that not all projects would need this, pirates for example, but the CPDN style projects would really benifit.

All that would need to happen would be to copy the active project folder to a backup directory will another project was being crunched.

Could even happen on daily basis.

What do you think?

BOINC 5.4.9 has one backup facility built in already: It makes a backup of the client_state.xml file each time this file is being written to. If for some reason the file gets corrupted, upon the next startup of Boinc the status of the file is being checked. If found corrupt the backup file is being used.

Furthermore, projects can update their server software to the newer BOINC CVS version which allows for files that were downloaded but went missing for some reason, to be redownloaded to your computer. One such project already using this is Einstein. it checks if the file you downloaded before from Einstein is still on your computer, if not, you get it sent again.

Then you get such an effect:
2006-06-27 16:05:14 [Einstein@Home] Message from server: Resent lost result h1_1263.5_S5R1__2651_S5R1a_0
2006-06-27 16:05:14 [Einstein@Home] Message from server: Resent lost result h1_1263.5_S5R1__2634_S5R1a_0

A much better solution than a full backup of your BOINC folder, in my opinion, as it can take up quite a bit of space. the above solution can take up quite a bit of server overhead though, which is probably why not all projects want to use it.

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Thanks for the info Ageless but my concern was more for models that take from 2500 to 3000 hours to complete.

The features in 5.4.x deal well with short WU's, even the longer one's at QMC, but I know that I would be upset if a CPDN model failed due to a system crash on my end.

Murphy's law states that if would occur at some point after 95% complete.

Anyway, its just a suggestion.

Murphy has updated his law: my SAP crashed a bit over a day ago at 67%.
At 9pm.
And I didn't find out until 4am next day. :(
(When I made use of a 20 hour old backup.)

Thanks for the info Ageless but my concern was more for models that take from 2500 to 3000 hours to complete.

The features in 5.4.x deal well with short WU's, even the longer one's at QMC, but I know that I would be upset if a CPDN model failed due to a system crash on my end.

Murphy's law states that if would occur at some point after 95% complete.

Anyway, its just a suggestion.

Unfortunately, with CPDN, your talking of a folder that can be several GB since that projects leaves old WUs on your system. They are already asking for a large chunk of the drive and few people would want to give up that much space to a single project.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

Unfortunately, with CPDN, your talking of a folder that can be several GB since that projects leaves old WUs on your system. They are already asking for a large chunk of the drive and few people would want to give up that much space to a single project.

An update on CPDN.
The project now cleans up after itself with the coupled models. i.e it deletes the old models after upload. (personally I prefer to keep a copy on DVD)

I know that a lot of CPDN style users manually backup the project directory as it is and I thought it would be a nice addition to the feature suite.

An update on CPDN.
The project now cleans up after itself with the coupled models. i.e it deletes the old models after upload. (personally I prefer to keep a copy on DVD)

Keeping model results is fine if you have access to your crunchers at any time. You can then manually back-up the results or wahtever. If access is not possible at all times, then this is really annoying: it fills up the space and no new work is allowed.

Perhaps it'd be really nice to have option on project preferences page. Some people would choose to keep the files and other would opt to remove results after work is done.

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Metod ...