Re: PV save and restore tool sought

[Thomas Birke <Thomas.Birke@bessy.de>]

Judith E. Rock wrote:
> Dear EPICS folk,
> The LCLS project at SLAC is seeking a good save and restore tool (something along the lines of BURT or SCORE) to manage saving and restoring specified PVs on demand.
> Does anyone have any recommendations or experiences to share with us?  We appreciate your input.
At BESSY, we use two of the already mentioned ways to save and restore 
specific PVs on demand.

The warm-reboot save-and-restore is realized with the IOC-based version 
of autosave as it comes with the synApps package.

Everything else is done with a powerful Tcl/Tk-frontend to "burt" and 
some sdds-tools (the latest version doesn't even use "burt" anymore).
It is an often-used program to save and restore specific settings of 
parts of or the whole machine (called snapshots) together with some 
meta-information

   * time and date of the snapshot
   * a comment provided by the user
   * the list of areas saved in this snapshot
   * some additional tags (Multi- or Single-Bunch, Energy...)

The program is based on a script we got from JLab (when it still was 
CEBAF) written by Bruce Dunham back in '95, but it was basically 
rewritten at least once over the last 10 years
It also provides additional features like

   * comparing stored snapshots in different ways
         o compare the contents of two snapshots
         o compare settings and readbacks within one snapshot
         o compare a snapshot with the current values read from the machine
   * filter list of stored snapshots by comment/tags/date
   * view the contents of a snapshot
         o if requested, filter signals by pattern
   * restore parts of or a whole snapshot
         o if necessary perform special operations before or after
           restoring
               + e.g. disable/enable some processing or request
               + request explicit confirmation before overwriting
                 certain values

The only thing, that's left from the CEBAF version is the fact, that it 
is still Tcl/Tk.

I also like the idea of having an archiver save a set of values on 
trigger (it's not even that new - wasn't there something called 
save-set-archiver several years ago?).
But I never had the time to work on this, and people here at BESSY 
actually got used to our SaveRestore.tcl.

Thomas Birke

BESSY GmbH
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