CyTOForum

Hi everyone,

When I was acquiring, I saved two very small fcs files (50k events each), but my third file did not save (700k events). Has anyone ever seen the following error before?

We are running beads and going to try and save a file larger than 500k events to see if it happens again, but if anyone has any input on how to avoid this error, that would be great.

-we had <1Tb of space when running
-I did have flowjo open in the background but I was not gating (I only had the two 50k event files open briefly)
-Teamviewer may have been open, but I believe I closed it in the middle of the run
-we normally have these apps open when running and have not had this issue

Thank you,
Martha

Hi Martha,

Did you get an IMD file in your target folder? Or just no files whatsoever for that sample?

On very rare occasions, we have had files not save properly. In the *majority* of the cases, it's because someone changed a file pathway during acquisition (including just renaming a folder in the save pathway); unfortunately, at least in the Helios software, this is not something that is checked until the IMD and FCS files are completed and ready to be written to the target E:// folder.

However, once or twice over the years, we've had a file not wind up in the right folder for some reason we could never figure out (it usually happened to someone else and unfortunately they didn't take a screenshot of the system log like you did).


If you didn't get *any* file saved for that sample, then there's a good chance your data is safe as the original temp files. I think it's still on E:// (maybe E:/CyTOF/ ?) and is probably a TXT or IMD file with "export_" followed by a bunch of numbers. It should have the right timestamp of when you acquired your sample.

If so, then there's a way to reprocess the IMD into a new FCS file.


Mike

Thank you Mike, we didn't get an IMD file, but I will look for the original temp files.