topic Re: SAS Autosave in SAS Programming

SAS Autosave

n6 — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:02:27 GMT

I googled this and it has been addressed before but I still don't get it. This is about autosave.

I assumed that if you're working on a program XYZ from folder Q and you have your Tools > Options > Preferences > Edit > Autosave set for every 5 minutes, then it saves your program under the name XYZ in folder Q every 5 minutes. So it saves it at 2:30 and then again at 2:35 and the most work you could lose is 4 minutes worth, if your computer crashed at 2:34.

But apparently that's not so. Instead it seems it autosaves it in some mysterious place on your computer and even then, only if you use Enhanced Editor (which I don't). Can it really be that in 2019 the only way to save your program XYZ in the folder Q is to do it manually every single time? Maybe (Hopefully) I'm wrong.

Any info is greatly appreciated.

Re: SAS Autosave

Krueger — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:04:58 GMT

I've never used this feature but with a very long past of programming and losing TONS of work I began using CTRL+S very frequently.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:16:10 GMT

Yes, I've discovered that (the hard way, like you) but even for that I have to remember and interrupt my train of thought.

Re: SAS Autosave

Reeza — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:25:25 GMT

Are you using SAS Foundation/Base? Which version?

I'm fairly certain Studio is saving it in the same place and I know they haven't been developing features in SAS Base/Foundation for about a decade now. Studio and EG are more likely to have the features you want.
You can also use any other IDE if so inclined, I'm becoming a fan of the Jupyter Notebooks myself.

Re: SAS Autosave

ballardw — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:27:58 GMT

@n6 wrote:

I googled this and it has been addressed before but I still don't get it. This is about autosave.

I assumed that if you're working on a program XYZ from folder Q and you have your Tools > Options > Preferences > Edit > Autosave set for every 5 minutes, then it saves your program under the name XYZ in folder Q every 5 minutes. So it saves it at 2:30 and then again at 2:35 and the most work you could lose is 4 minutes worth, if your computer crashed at 2:34.

But apparently that's not so. Instead it seems it autosaves it in some mysterious place on your computer and even then, only if you use Enhanced Editor (which I don't). Can it really be that in 2019 the only way to save your program XYZ in the folder Q is to do it manually every single time? Maybe (Hopefully) I'm wrong.

Any info is greatly appreciated.

For the PROGRAM window you may want to consider actually setting the AUTOSAVELOC option to path you want. May want that in your Autoexec.sas.

You can find the current setting for the option with:

proc options option=autosaveloc;
run;

If undefined, which I suspect is the default with SAS expecting most users to use the Enhanced Editor that may be why you are having a hard time finding the files.

For consistency you might want to point that to

C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\SAS\EnhancedEditor

if running on Windows to have all of the autosave go to the same location.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:28:43 GMT

I'm just using regular SAS. which I assume is Base SAS. It is Version 9.4 TS Level 1M1.

Re: SAS Autosave

Reeza — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:29:48 GMT

9.4 M1 is from 2013.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:33:27 GMT

I've never seen that proc options autosave thing before. Maybe the thing to do would be to put that line at the top of every program you right, with it pointing to where you want to save it. I'm going to have to check to see if that really works.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:34:47 GMT

But how do I make it point to anywhere? And why would I want it to point to Enhanced Editor? Shouldn't I just want it to point the location on my computer where I want to save the program?

Re: SAS Autosave

SASKiwi — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 21:55:13 GMT

@n6 - The Autosave feature is there to act as a backup to the primary way you save your program, controlled by explicit manual saving. Would you try and store your disk backups in the same location as your primary storage?

By all means put it in a location more meaningful to you, but it should be in a separate folder to your primary storage.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:27:42 GMT

Okay, with the help of this post I have figured it out. If you run the following and then go to the log window...

proc options option=autosaveloc;
run;

...you just see "AUTOSAVELOC=" IOW, it is not being autosaved. So you can specify the location for it using the options autosave= command.

Supposed your program is located in the folder C:\Project and is named xyz.sas. Suppose you submit this line

options autosave = 'c:\Project\xyz.sas';

That tells SAS to autosave your program The frequency with which it will be autosaved can be specified by doingTest > Options > Prefernces > Edit

Having the autosave overwrite it in the same place you're have it might not be desirable. So what I'm going to (try) to get into the habit of doing is, in any folder in which I have a SAS program I'm going to have a subfolder named Autosave_Pgm. And when I start writing a program, I'm going to add the a line at the top that will autosave the program to the Autosave_Pgm. If I get into the habit of doing it when I'm already putting that sort of info at the top of a program (name, purpose, etc) then it will become a habit.

What's not clear to me is that whether the option will remain on when I close SAS then open it later. But I can just start making the first line I run each time I open the program be the options autosave line and that should work

So for the above example, I'll run

options autosave 'C:\Project\Autosave_Pgm\xyz.sas';

each time I open the program.

Thanks for the help.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:43:20 GMT

Okay, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean, if I was talking about some new thing then I should expected only newer versions of SAS to be up to date on it, but saving a program is a forever thing.

Re: SAS Autosave

Reeza — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:49:24 GMT

You're using an older interface, that SAS has stopped adding enhancements and features to 10 years ago.
SAS Studio and EG have the features you want, that's my point. I don't necessarily agree with it, I'm just explaining why the feature doesn't likely exist. No one is developing enhancements for SAS Base as they're trying to push users to EG or Studio, and the features you want are in those tools since they're more recent.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:52:16 GMT

Okay, so what version of SAS would have I have to get SAS Studio and EG? I would consider doing it if I knew. On one hand I don't want to become someone out of touch with new things but OTOH in the past I've sometimes experienced pain going to a newer version of SAS because things that worked perfectly before sometimes suddenly no longer work.

Re: SAS Autosave

Tom — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:53:36 GMT

I think you a missing a key concept of how autosave works. There are a lot of limitations on what it can do. The main idea is that you can tell SAS to periodically save a copy of whatever you have in the program editor into a specific place. It is not going to try to save the file you are editing.

How would the editor even know what file you are editing? You can open file X with the intent of making changes and saving it as file Y. In that case your would NOT want SAS to make any changes to X.

By default it just makes a file name pgm.asv, but you can change that using the options.

AUTOSAVELOC=

AUTOSAVELOC= (unix)

There are also commands for controlling whether/when to autosave:

WAUTOSAVE DMS command

SETAUTOSAVE DMS command (unix)

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:58:39 GMT

It seems that it is saving the file I'm editing. I did as I described a few posts ago and it works. I have a subfolder and I point there via options autosave= and then when I change the SAS program I'm working on in the Program Editor, every five minutes it saves it in that subfolder I specified. If I don't change the program at all it doesn't save it, but if I change it, then SAS saves it.

I just tried it again. The only change I made to the progam in the Program Editor is I hit the return key once. And a few minutes later, it save the program in that subfolder.

Re: SAS Autosave

Tom — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 19:07:27 GMT

@n6 wrote:

It seems that it is saving the file I'm editing. I did as I described a few posts ago and it works. I have a subfolder and I point there via options autosave= and then when I change the SAS program I'm working on in the Program Editor, every five minutes it saves it in that subfolder I specified. If I don't change the program at all it doesn't save it, but if I change it, then SAS saves it.

I just tried it again. The only change I made to the progam in the Program Editor is I hit the return key once. And a few minutes later, it save the program in that subfolder.

Are you using PC SAS? What happens when you have two files open and you make changes to both? Does it save both files to their original location? Does it save both files to the same location so that the last one saved is all that is available?

What if you have one file open in the normal program editor (the one that works on Unix also and supports commands in the line number area) and the "enhanced" editor?

At one point you could point the AUTOSAVELOC to a DIRECTORY but that functionality seems to be missing in the current documentation and I remember that it seemed to change at one point.

Re: SAS Autosave

n6 — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 19:18:28 GMT

I don't know if I"m using PC SAS. I'm using SAS on a PC.

I never have two files open of the same name so that doesn't matter. But what you wrote did make me think of something potentially bad.

1. You open SAS and it has default options.

2. You open program xyz and run the autosave code so that it is going to autosave your xyz.sas program in a certain place.

3. You're finished for now with program xyz, so you clear your Program Editor window and then open up program abc instead.

4. But since options hold for your entire SAS session unless you change them, after you start editing program abc, after a few minutes it will autosave abc in wherever the options tells it to, which is where you autosave program xyz. Thus, you could inadvertently overwrite the autosaved version of xyz.

5. If you wanted, you could do a new autosave line for program abc as soon as you opened abc, but it's possible that the clock ticking to do the autosave will hit the limit after you open program abc but before you've submitted the autosave line for program abc, thus saving program abc in the place where program xyz is supposed to be.

6. One way around all this is to close SAS entirely after you're finished working on a program and then re-open it to work on your next program, but that would be a pain and plus you'd probably sometimes forget.

7. Then again, if the only time you need the autosaved program is when SAS crashes while you're working on a program, then it might be okay. Let it overwrite the autosaved xyz with abc because after I'm done with xyz, I save the main program before clearing the Program Editor window and thus if the autosaved version of xyz gets autosaved over, so what?

Re: SAS Autosave

Reeza — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 20:01:38 GMT

It's not an issue of versions, it's the client you use to interface with SAS. SAS Studio does work with SAS 9.4M versions afaik. You just need to install the appropriate thin clients.

Re: SAS Autosave

SASKiwi — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 23:25:51 GMT

@n6 - There are three SAS programming interfaces you can choose from. The one you are using is the SAS Windowing Environment, which is installed by default with Base SAS. This is essentially a legacy interface that is just maintained and does not get any enhancements.

There are two newer interfaces, SAS Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide that are being continuously enhanced. This link will help you learn about these: https://support.sas.com/software/products/sas-studio/faq/SASStudio_vsEG.htm

Please note you could use either SAS Studio or SEG on a standalone PC, although that usually requires additional installation and configuration.