How to backup the PI settings?

[maymac789]

During all these years, from time to time, when I open PI, and with no apparent reason (ie no previous program or computer crash), PI resets it's settings to the default. Not a big deal, but I usually have my UI heavily customized (eg I prefer the console bottom right, or I have a different set of favorites in the Process Explorer or a customized toolbar). Not  a big deal, I can customize them again in 5-10 minutes, but I wonder, where PI keeps the settings under Windows and Linux? Is there a way to back them up for the next time ?

[dnault42]

Hi,

The favorites can be saved by going to the menu Process->Favorites->Save Favorite Process Collection...  You will see a 'Load' option in the same menu for replaying your saved favorites.

If you go to the Edit menu and go down to 'Global Preferences', 'Read Options' or 'Color Management Setup' you will find that each of the popup forms have a 'new instance' icon (blue triangle on the lower left of the form).  This can be drug to the PI desktop as a process icon.  If you do this for all of these menu options and then drag and select them you can right click on them and select 'Save Selected Icons...'  You can also put them in a process container so there is only one icon to save.  In either case those icons can be reloaded, brought up and then globally applied (circle icon on the bottom of the form).  To reload the icons you can either drag the .xpsm file you saved from an operating system file browser to the PI desktop or you can right click on the PI desktop and go to Process Icons->Load Process Icons... or Merge Process Icons... and select the .xpsm file you saved previously.  The merge version does not clear out any existing desktop icons you may already have in that session and will resolve icon names by appending numbers.

Between these two things you can retain the look and feel of your PixInsight environment after clean installs, major crashes, etc.

Regards,
David