The purpose of autosave is to capture tunable parameters in a config-independent way. Examples of things we autosave are things like motor settings (resolutions, speeds, etc.).

In the future, we may use an autosave-like mechanism to apply snapshots of motor settings at a particular time to an IOC again. However this is not currently implemented nor required on any beamline that we support.

Mixing autosave with IOCs that load a dynamic number of axes/sensors can be dangerous. If the IOC is accidentally started with a macro that makes the IOC load no axes, autosave will save a file containing no values. When the IOC is subsequently restarted with the correct macros, it will read the autosave file (which has no values in it). This causes the IOC to "lose" its previously saved values. This was seen in https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/IBEX/issues/2180.

To add autosave to a field see autosave PVs in finishing touches.

You can force autosave to save at a given point by writing a command into the iocsh. The command: manual_save("<my_file>.req").

You can find "<my_file>.req" from the ioc startup logs create_monitor_set("<my_file>.req", ...).

If you wish to do this in the IocTestFramework you can with the ProcServLauncher. First you need the ioc to access: self._lewis, self._ioc = get_running_lewis_and_ioc("<device_name>", DEVICE_PREFIX) and then you can run self._ioc.telnet.write("manual_save(\"KEPCO_01_info_settings.req\")\n").

See https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/ibex_developers_manual/wiki/IOC-And-Device-Trouble-Shooting#autosave