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Here we document how we organize our data archive and its supporting files. Once we have all the documentation organized, we will incorporate an online data archive on this site, using this arrangement. This is not yet online and will not be until we have the final data products checked and ready for public distribution.
I do all my work on Dell PCs with, over the years, various flavors of Windows. At present, the SSS archive is maintained at the root level of a dedicated 500 GB hard drive (regularly and multiply backed up, of course). I run IDL V 7.0 on a Dell XPS laptop running Windows Vista.
The high level directory structure for the SSS project is arranged as follows.
The directory names are intended to be self-evident. "Raw" is a holding pen for new data from the cameras, and "raw_fits" contains the FITS-standard raw data files. "Reducing" stores many of the intermediate data products used during reduction. For large reduction jobs, we use the "dsc" and "sctlt" directories to hold the products of the scattered light removal routine, because on occasions we have accumulated more than 65,535 files in a directory, at which point Windows will commit ritual seppuku if the partition is FAT32. "Reduced" contains the extracted spectra. And you'll never guess what "results" contains.
Solar and stellar data are stored in the parallel directory structures of the same name. In all cases, "res" is short for "resource," and indicated directories that hold files with supporting data and diagnostic output from reduction steps.
The rootdir path is stored as an IDL system variable in my startup.pro file, along with a few other other system variables. Here are the system variables relevant to these routines (the first line will vary from system to system; the others will not).
DefSysV, '!DBPATH', 'f:'
DefSysV, '!TRUE', 1B
DefSysV, '!FALSE', 0B
DefSysV, '!OIL_MSG', '10000'XL
DefSysV, '!OIL_WRN', '20000'XL
DefSysV, '!OIL_ERR', '40000'XL
DefSysV, '!OIL_ALL', '70000'XL