SAVE SAVE SAVE!
One of the best things you can do is Save your work. If you're making a small change here or there, just save the file you're woking on by hitting the save icon in the upper left.
If you're making big changes, do a file, Save as, under a new name BEFORE YOU MAKE THE CHANGES. After doing that, click the "replace file" icon (next to the save icon) and replace the existing file with your new file you just created. Now make you changes.
Another thing to know is that as you tweak the program, if the car is running and on-line, you're making LIVE changes to the ECU and the map and it saves each time a change it made, even if you don't hit Save on the laptop. If you lose power to the EFI or the laptop prior to hitting save on the laptop, your map WILL BE SAVED only within the EFI IN THE CAR, but NOT THE LAPTOP (I cap because this is important
). When power is restored, you'll be prompted to replace the map on the laptop with the map that's on the EFI in the car or vise-a-versa. Generally, you want to replace the map on the laptop with what's in the car, since the car saves live and the one in the laptop doesn't save until you tell it to...
All that said, you'll want to develop a system that allows you to go back in time to previous maps should you ever choose to. I do that everyonce in a while just as a reminder of what I 'used' to be happy with compared to what I have now
I basically change to a different phonetic alphabit name each time I make a BIG change and then add dot 1, 2, 3, etc for small changes as I clean things up from the big change... For instance I'm on Golf.5 right now. (I must admit that I skipped "Charlie" as to not add confusion to anyone working from my maps. No offense Charlie!!!!
). I also like to add any other key things about the tune like when the cam change is. In my case, it's at 5,300 right now. So Golf.5.CAM5300... There are other important descriptors like PID (which is basically closed loop opertation) that I put in the file name as well... I'll get to what and how PID works later... It's pretty simple and very cool...
Best,
Phil