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Kitt Peak to "Save-the-Bits" (1Sep93) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 35, 1 September 1993) Starting with the Summer Queue Scheduling Experiment, and continuing (we hope) into the fall Semester, all images taken with CCDs on KPNO telescopes will automatically be saved onto Exabyte tapes. A copy of each raw CCD frame will be routed over Ethernet to a Sun workstation in the Admin Building, where the headers will be cataloged and indexed, and the data written to tape. The tape will contain images interspersed from all CCDs in operation. The process should be "transparent" to observers! This tape archive may provide some minimal form of backup for observers' data, but at this early stage in the experiment we cannot guarantee that the system will be reliable. Observers should still expect to be responsible for saving their own data via tape or other media. In an emergency, we may be able to recover lost data, but cannot always be sure of doing that. If things go smoothly, we hope that this project will replace the T-tape backup procedure (see following article) next summer. Until we gain more experience with data archiving through these initial experiments, we unfortunately cannot make the data available to the community. In any case, a proprietary period in which the original investigators have sole access to the data will apply. We hope to learn more about the general nature of data collected on Kitt Peak telescopes through this experiment, and to take advantage of the archive to monitor and evaluate detector and telescope performance. Caty Pilachowski, Rob Seaman, Bruce Bohannan
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