Saving your 'environment' if PI has to be shut down

[Niall Saunders]

Hi All,

We all appreciate being able to save our Process Icons within PI - but what I would really love to be able to do is to save my FULL WORKING ENVIRONMENT so that I can shut down PI, and my PC, but still be able to return to where, and how, I was working.

That means all open views, and their locations, also need to be saved, along with their full, individual, Process History.

Really, what is needed is a PixInsight 'Hibernate' function. (I have had PI running for WEEKS now, because I am trying to develop a script, and do not want to lose the way I have everything set up).

And, of course, this ability - if available - also immediately allows a 'safety net' facility to be implemented, whereby the operational state could be saved every 'xx' minutes - giving peace of mind should the operating system take a nose-dive !!

However, an even more irritating gripe that I am having (with the 01.04.05.0467 build for Windows 64) is that I 'lose' my toolbar layout and setup every time I shut PI down. That must surely be a 'bug' of some sort, and one that really IS annoying !

What are the chances ?

Cheers,

[Harry page]

Hi Niall

Yes this is excellent suggestion and would save a lot of time !

Regards Harry

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Niall and Harry,

I just can tell you that this is being cooked

We are starting to work on a project functionality for PixInsight. A PixInsight project will be able to save and restore the state of the PixInsight platform, including images, previews, processing histories, icons, settings, scripts, etc.

(I have had PI running for WEEKS now, because I am trying to develop a script, and do not want to lose the way I have everything set up)

This is indeed a proof of stability!

The new version 1.5 is much more stable. I have fixed literally hundreds of bugs, some of them critical. So with 1.5 you should be able to run PI during years 8) (just joking)

whereby the operational state could be saved every 'xx' minutes - giving peace of mind should the operating system take a nose-dive !!

Well, this is different. Actually PixInsight has a PSM Autosave feature which, if not disabled through Preferences, saves all of your process icons every 30 seconds (the interval can also be changed with Preferences).

However, saving the PixInsight's state is quite different. A PSM file usually requires a few kilobytes, a few megabytes in extreme cases (many icons with hundreds of DBE samples and CloneStamp actions for example). Writing PSM files can be done very efficiently as a background task, as PSM Autosave does. But a PixInsight project can easily involve file sizes in the gigabyte range...

However, an even more irritating gripe that I am having (with the 01.04.05.0467 build for Windows 64) is that I 'lose' my toolbar layout and setup every time I shut PI down. That must surely be a 'bug' of some sort, and one that really IS annoying !

Of course, this *shouldn't* happen. I can't reproduce this on Linux and Mac OS X; toolbars are restored without problems. I don't have the Windows virtual machine running now, but tomorrow I'll check this possible bug as soon as I start working. This has to be fixed for 1.5. Thanks for pointing out.