I shut down my system the previous night only to find my sequence and equipment profile were lost the next morning. This is not the end of the world but quite a cumbersome task to recreate all the events etc. I have entered all the equipment details and was about to create the targets and events last night but some friends dropped by and I had to stop. Half an hour ago I decided to continue and made some changes to the focus settings and wanted to save the sequence as profile, but… the profile was not there again… I don’t know what is going on but this is scary Some gremlins are working against me I guess… as a precaution, I saved the sequence copies to several different folders in my hard drive… I’m curious to know if anyone else is facing this problem ? The log files can be found here
I had something similar happen to me last month. For some reason my computer shut down unexpectedly and when I restarted it I could not reload the sequence I was using. It was there but gave me a fatal error when loading. And yes, it is a pain to have to recreate a sequence in the dark rather than imaging.
SGP does save progress as the sequence goes on. It’s possible that the
system died at the same time sgp was saving and the file was corrupted. If
you can post the sequence here I can take a look.
I doubt I still have it but I’ll check. I had not considered that SGP was updating the file beyond me doing a save. You might want to consider ways to make it more bullet proof in such a situation - it really was a bummer losing the file that way.
Sadly this is somewhat out of our control. We tell windows to write data and if something files mid write we can’t do a lot. I guess we could do something like creating a bak file and never writing the two of them simultaneously. Or if you prefer to disable this behavior all together you can disable the Auto Save from the Tools >> Options window. Keep in mind that doing this will not keep track of your sequence progress unless you manually save the file.
Jared, in my case, nothing was wrong with the computer or W7… I have terminated everything properly… and the computer remained running… I usually leave it running all the time… did you see anything odd in the log file ? I guess “sg_logfile_20180502210300” should be the one recorded during my imaging and when everything was in place and “sg_logfile_20180503100443” must be the one when I got a fatal error message from SGP when tried to load the sequence next morning.
and what about the Equipment Profile ? It also disappeared during this glitch.
I just had the same thing happen to me. An equipment profile I’d spent hours creating over several nights vanished. I’d just completed my final setup task, which was using the Flats Calibration Wizard, and clicked the Save button at the end of the calibration run, only to get a long error message. The program crashed and closed, and when I reopened it, all equipment profiles were gone. Now I must start from scratch with focus calibration with all my filters. Frustrating.
Hi, Ken. Thanks for responding. First of all, notwithstanding the problem I had with two of my profiles being deleted on successive nights, SGP is excellent software. I own Maxim DL and have used several camera vendors’ control software going back to the earliest versions of CCDOps in the 90s. In my view, SGP is tops in all respects for astroimaging of targets outside the solar system. (I personally think FireCapture rules the roost for planetary imaging.) So thank you for developing it.
I’ve been using the latest version of SGP. I don’t know what went wrong, and I’m certainly open to the possibility it was user error and that I somehow deleted those profiles by answering prompt windows too quickly as I was closing the program down. I’ll report back if I have other problems. In the meantime, I’m being extra careful when I respond to prompts about whether to save various files and profiles. I also rebuilt my most used profile in SGP and took screenshots of all the data inputs I’ve made so I can reconstruct any disappearing profiles much more easily if this happens again. I hope the problem never recurs, but if it does, I’ll let you know. Thanks.
Larry,
This was an issue with how the saves were happening. Techinically they were still there, just corrupt and SGP couldn’t read them. I recommend using Dropbox (or similar, Google Drive, etc) and point your profile directory there. Most cloud providers have a “go back” feature so you can recover older files. You certainly shouldn’t have to do this but it’s a nice backup in the event that something happens or your machine completely dies.
Some gremlins are working against me I guess… as a precaution, I saved the sequence copies to several different folders in my hard drive… I’m curious to know if anyone else is facing this problem ? The log files can be found here