two questions from a newbie :)

[littleferris68]

ok guys...new guy has got some questions for ya

question 1.) i was folding last night after i first dowloaded FAH and i turned off my computer (still getting my new rig set up and worried about temps) and i just turned my computer back on and all the progress i had made is gone. i was under the impression that the program runs an autosave feature and it would just pick up where it left off at. any thoughts on this?

question 2.) i have both a PC desktop and a mac laptop and i was wondering if i could run FAH on both systems at the same time with the same username. anyone heard of this? and i guess while we are at it, can i run on both of those and the ps3 (if they even have that version anymore. lol. still a newbie like i said).

thanks in advance for the help.

so stoked about FAH and im rather upset it took me so long to hear about it. im already trying to get all my buddies in on it. i support it full heartedly and i hope that, somewhere, somehow, if we can't even cure it but treat it better, that even more amazing stuff comes from this program. keep up the great work guys...hope i can help.



-Tim

[Jesse_V]

Hi there littleferris68, welcome to the Folding@home support forum!

1. Yes F@h makes periodic checkpoints from which it will pick up progress if interrupted. It's possible that something happened and this checkpoint was corrupted or lost. Such things happen at times. What exactly did you do? You just did a regular shutdown right?

2. Yes, Folding@home can run on Windows, Linux, OS-X, and the PlayStation 3. It can also utilize your PC's graphics card for additional computing power. All these clients are available through the Download page.

Thank you for joining Folding@home!

[Joe_H]

To expand on the answers already posted, yes, F@H does write checkpoints. How often depends on how each folding core is set up, how each project enables it, and how the folding client handles checkpointing. Some clients even keep a previous checkpoint in case the current one gets corrupted. The checkpoint can get corrupted if interrupted while being written to disk. If that happens, depending on other factors, the client will either start with a previous checkpoint, start at the beginning, or sometimes dump the unit.

When you get more familiar with folding, you can check the last modification time of the checkpoint files in the work directory before pausing F@H and shutting down your machine. You can also adjust how often they are written, the default time ranges from 5 to 15 minutes depending on client or project.

AS for using the same username on more than one machine, yes you can. Using the same username, team and passkey gets all points awarded assigned to one record. For instance, all four of the machines listed in my signature have the same information entered for username, team and passkey.