Where have my projects gone

Just logged on to try another simulation run to be greeted by a blank dashboard and the banner

HELP! :open_mouth::hushed::anguished::fearful::cold_sweat:

Whew, panic over… posting the above message seems to have restored sanity…

Closing browser and rebooting sadly didn’t… go figure…

Hi @irving,

I have encountered such issues before and it is usually because the sever is undergoing some form of maintenance or upgrades so you may not have access to your projects temporarily till everything is up again.

If there are further issues, let me tag @jousefm who may be able to better assist you.

Cheers.

Regards,
Barry

Thanks. I had considered that but there was no ‘system in maintenance’ warning. Anyway, in a cloud-based environment system maintenance should never cause downtime (I was the technology consultant for one of the largest AWS based e-commerce platforms in the UK). So obviously a fault but posting the ‘question’ instantly recovered the dashboard; too coincidental IMHO.

Hi @irving!

I did not encounter any issue like that so far but I will let the engineers know maybe there have been cases in the past that confirm your observation.

Best,

Jousef

thanks @jousefm & @Get_Barried

Just had a moment of panic there as I was just setting up a demo to new students of example simulations I use on the MSc course I teach only to find whole years work missing… Which begs questions about backup and exporting simulations to alternate platforms I hadn’t thought about previously. I have a similar issue with Onshape and the lack of project level exportability there.

Hi @irving!

I hope everything is fine now? About the exportability: You could indeed start doing this but especially for this you could run into trouble if you have a lot of CFD simulations that you want to save and if you made changes this would be a bit too much I guess. One idea would be to upload it to a platform like Github and commit changes there but you might receive a polite email from GitHub Support if your upload exceeds 1GB I think :thinking: I am thinking about another way we could optimize this process if that is something that’s really relevant for you but we never had problems with projects disappearing. Maybe Richard (@rszoeke) can add some comments here.

Best,

Jousef

Hi @jousefm

Seems OK though I had some issues earlier this morning where the post-processing wouldn’t load and left a blank space. Closing and re-opening the browser did seem to address this after a couple of tries which suggests it may have been an issue with one or more web servers in the cluster though it could equally been a network glitch somewhere. Prior to yesterday Simscale’s web delivery has been rock solid for the 2y I’ve been playing with it.

On the export issue, its not so much about backup but more about ownership. I was contemplating what happens if you have all your designs, simulations, workflow, etc in OnShape/Simscale and then you need, for business/commercial reasons, to move to an in-house or other 3rd party platform, e.g. Solidworks, Fusion, etc. How can you do that if the internal representation on the cloud platform isn’t visible or in a transferable format? I know you can export stuff but just transferring files isn’t sufficient if you need to reconfigure and validate all your simulations, etc.

Best,
Irving

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