There is, in fact, a risk of loosing valuable data that you collect in any field program. On most of the newer data collectors that we sell (Carlson Mini-2, Carlson Surveyor-2, Nautiz-X8, Ranger 3…) the operating system is loaded in the same space as the program and data files.
If anything goes wrong, you must reinstall the operating system from scratch. This wipes out your program installations and it will wipe out all of the data that is stored on the device.
Many customers choose to store data on the SD or micro-SD card that typically is loaded in the battery compartment. But there is a significant speed decrease in using SD memory on most data collectors (see [making-survce-fast-survey-store-points-faster].) The SD memory access sometimes is 100 times slower than the main memory.
Luckily SurvCE has a simple mechanism that allows you to continuously back-up your work during the day.
First make sure that your data collector has a SD or micro-SD card installed. These usually are placed in the battery compartment.
When you start a new job put it in the main memory. The default location in SurvCE is “/Device/Program Files/ SurvCE/Data/”.
Immediately after you start a job from the main menu go to ‘Equip: 6: Data Transfer’:
Click on the ‘Set Storage’ button, navigate to the SD card (often called ‘Storage Card’) and configure the destination to be a new folder. I like to use ‘SurvCEJobBU’ because it makes sense:
Once the folder is configured, click on the ‘Copy Crt (current) Job to Storage’. It will take about 1/2 second to replicate all of the job files in the backup location.
Now, throughout the day when you have collected enough data that you think it would be a bad deal to loose the recent changes, return to this menu and just click the ‘Copy Crt…’ button again.
iG GPS 