What happened to my data?

Can anyone help calm my nerves please.

Yesterday evening (between 20:00 and 23:30 GMT, 9th June) I digitized many roads in the North Canterbury area of the South Island, New Zealand, and assigned attributes to them (a few got names, all got ‘highway’ classifications).

Today I go to look at what I’ve done and half the ways are missing - randowmly amongst my data - simply not there! That means I have to go carefully over everything I did and check every bloomin thing. How can half of them simply dissapear? They don’t seem to have gone in time order (it wasn’t the last ones, or first, or between 2 different time periods). The stuff that’s gone hasn’t gone by location, or type. Just randomly half the stuff is missing.

I added the lot from Potlatch, usigng the Yahoo satellite images for background.

This is REALLY frustrating. If the data won’t stick, there’s not much point in enterring it, and I might as well bugger off and do something else. Keep this up and others will too…

Frustrated…

-Ken :frowning:

Have you got a link to the exact area you mean?

The obvious things to do/check would be:

  1. are you looking at the tiles@home layer on the IF page, or “the map”. “The map” uses proxy servers wich collect older tiles to take the strange on the tiles@home (direct) server.
  2. clear your history, and do a full refresh to get new tiles

Hi Ben

The area I’m working in is here: http://www.informationfreeway.org/index.php?user=kmf&lat=-43.3&lon=172.65&zoom=12&layers=B000000
I put in about twice as many ways as show up at the moment. For example, there are 2 lanes of motorway (I haven’t coded them 1-way yet) plus another primary road and a railway line crossing the gap in the middle (the Waimakariri river). 3 out of 4 of my bridge ways are not there. Another: there should be a railway line right to the top of the data are. Currently it stops half way.

I have cleared my history, and refreshed (F5) in my browser. I have re-rendered the tiles@home. I have upgraded Firefox from 1.something to 2.0. I have downloaded the data to my PC and used osmarender locally. I see slightly different amounts of data in each (some show the motoway onramps, some dont. Probably the standard rules file needs a tweak?). Anyway, none show my bridges, etc.

So I am left wondering:
-did they stuff up big time in the last 24 hours at OSM corp, and not let on? Did they wind back a file or forget to switch off access when they were swapping servers or somehow they didn’t guard against loosing data? Did they think noone would be using the system in teh (UK) nighttime?
-did they have a big crash and restored from backup and forgot to tell us?
-will they reindex and my ways will come back, or should I re-enter them?
-should I trust the system not to do this again or should I give up and go elsewhere?

Many thanks for your replies to my other posts. do you know a sysop or ‘steve’ or someone who can answer my question? Many thanks.
-Ken

First problem is that you should be checking the (drop down) tiles@home layer here.

http://www.informationfreeway.org/index.php?lat=-43.29999999999999&lon=172.65&user=kmf&zoom=12&layers=0B00F00

The second problem is that you have tagged the motorway link roads as " motorway_link" rather than “motorway_link”. The space at the start is what is stopping it rendering.

I’ve rerequested the 2 top left tiles, as there the only two that appear outdated.

The bridges do appear also, you need to zoom in.

-OSM isn’t as centralised as I think you think it is. Its just other people such as you or myself. Its a wiki project, although some elements do bottleneck. Steve is the founder, although there isn’t any structure hiarachy, So the problems don’t all stem to him. For the osmarender layer specifically the site and rendering rules are mangaged by Etienne, and t@h was made by OJW.

-there was a switch to the new version of the API a few weeks ago wich was a big problem, and we are still in the aftermath really. All the random blue tiles on the osmarender layer are a result of this, and the changing of harddrives also.
-I would stick at it if I were you, it really is taking some huge strides in the right direction at the moment. Consider than only 5 months ago there next to no map at all, just a distance database that you uploaded and downloaded from. Your edits seem quite neat. All I would suggest is that there is no need for more than 1 node on a straight bit of road. Nodes are only needed when 2 segments change the direction of the way slightly. I noticed one pedestrian route that has a string of nodes all in a row, wich seems a bit unnessesery.

Hmm, answered some questions, but not where my data went. I’m using layers=0B00F00 and that helped a bit. I will (*) update the atributes of the onramps so they are rendered ok. But there is still 1/2 my data missing. E.g. the railway line was enterred as a series of way extending from the very top to bottom of the area I was working in. There are several parts of it missing. the bridges I’m talking about are supposed to be here: http://www.informationfreeway.org/index.php?user=kmf&lat=-43.414&lon=172.65&zoom=16&layers=0B00F00 and they clearly aren’t.

I realise there was a change of API and the issues resulting - I fixed a page today in the Wiki, that hadn’t caught up, and added some extra useful info (figured out the hard way. See the ‘Download the data: 1’ section of the Osmarender Howto page).

I think the pedestrian route is supposed to have lots of other roads crossing (and they have evaporated). Not sure. Where?

I guess the big question I have is: Should I redo what was lost or will it magically come back by itself?

There is already a link to addition help on the beginners guide main page > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Additional_Help , I don’t think sending people to find help first is correct, becuase that defeats the point of the tutorial teaching people.

All the data that I can download in that area into JOSM shows up on the map. I have never uploaded anything and not been able to download it again. I havn’t heard of that problem with potlatch either, although it isn’t completly stable so it is posible it is an error. I very much dought the data is there if you can’t download it though, so If I were you I would add it again. I would also use josm unless you intend only to trace.

I can’t really help any more, I am not a potlatch user I’m affriad, and I’m not shore if many people are.

Many thanks. I will continue with Potlatch (I’m digitising from photos because they are really good and I’m currently in Germany), and I will check that my work has stuck by downloading it periodically into JOSM.
Cheers, -Ken

Figured it out. There’s a little “!” icon that appears if data could not be uploaded. You click on this (hovering over it doesn’t say what it is - one has to experiment!) and it pops up a window “Unable to upload. Try again?”. Click ‘yes’ and your data magically appears in the database!

But of course - it’s so obvious… NOT! I hope a Potlatch developer reads this one day :slight_smile:

-Ken

I’d suggest you right up this in the beginners section in the online editor section, so that others can avoid this hurdle.
The potlatch developer (singlular I think), is RichardF.