Knowledgebase

Experiment data is at risk of being lost – due to power failure, hardware failure, or software failure – until written to disk.

Unfortunately, at this time AfterMath data cannot be written to disk until after the experiment is completed. Therefore data is always at risk during an experiment, and continues to be at risk even after the experiment is completed until the user manually selects “save archive” to write the data to disk.

This means that there is presently no way to automatically or manually save the data during experiments.

Note that this will be addressed in future releases of the software.

If the power to the potentiostat is interrupted (or the potentiostat is simply turned off), the experiment data collected so far is not lost. The user can end the experiment and choose to keep or discard the incomplete data. If the data is kept, it is placed into the archive at that time. However, until the user manually selects “save archive” it is still not written to the disk, and therefore is still at risk.

If power to the computer were interrupted ( or the hardware or software failed ), then ALL the data for the experiment in progress would be lost ( as well as any other new data not manually saved to disk using “save archive” ). As discussed above, the data is lost even if the user has selected “save archive” during the experiment because the data for an experiment in progress is not placed in the archive until the experiment is completed.

Therefore, it is most critical to keep the PC running, and second most critical to keep the potentiostat running. Battery-powered backup is recommended, via the laptop battery and/or an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).