MDT AutoSave: History, System Platform End of Life and Successor

MDT AutoSave is the disaster recovery and change management software that MDT Software, of Alpharetta, Georgia, sold to manufacturers for decades. It backed up the programs and configurations of the devices on a plant floor, from many vendors, and told the plant when what was running no longer matched what was stored. Since the 2022 merger that formed AUVESY-MDT, now AMDT, AutoSave has been succeeded by octoplant. As of October 2026 it is in the final, consulting-only phase of its retirement.

This page covers MDT’s history, what AutoSave did, its North American base, the end of AutoSave for System Platform, and what carried into octoplant. The full retirement schedule is on the parent page, versiondog and AutoSave.

Where MDT AutoSave came from

1987: MDT Software was founded in Alpharetta, Georgia. AMDT still dates its own story from that year (“Advancing industrial resilience since 1987” on About AMDT), which makes AutoSave’s lineage the older half of the company.

Before Hg, MDT had a different majority owner. When Hg invested on 4 August 2021, through its Mercury 3 fund, the majority owner of Desco Corporation fully exited his position in MDT (Hg).

At that point MDT reported more than 400 customers and over a million industrial devices under management in 44 countries (same source). Hg described AutoSave as supporting “all manufacturers to effectively manage an increasing array of smart devices on the plant floor.”

January 2022: the merger with AUVESY, which Hg had invested in that April. The combined company, AUVESY-MDT, launched octoplant in April 2022. The Alpharetta business is now AMDT Americas.

Date	Event
1987	MDT Software founded in Alpharetta, Georgia
4 Aug 2021	Hg invests; Desco’s majority owner exits; 400+ customers, 1M+ devices, 44 countries
11 Jan 2022	Merger with AUVESY forms AUVESY-MDT
19 Apr 2022	octoplant launched as successor to AutoSave and versiondog
2023–2024	Renewals only, no new AutoSave licences (per becolve)
31 Dec 2024	Full support ends
End of 2025	Limited support phase ends (critical fixes and level 1–2 support only during 2025)
31 Dec 2025	AutoSave for System Platform end of life, as reported in the AVEVA Community
2026	Consulting only; support can no longer be renewed

What MDT AutoSave did

Hg’s description, “disaster recovery and change management,” is the right summary. In practice that meant four things:

• Scheduled backups of PLC, HMI, robot and other device programs to a central server, so the latest copy did not depend on someone remembering to upload it
• Change detection: comparing what was running in a device against the stored version, and reporting the difference
• Version history, so an engineer could see what a device held last month as well as today
• Recovery: a known-good copy to put back after a hardware failure, a bad edit or worse

The plant consequence. Illustrative scenario: a processor fails on second shift. The technician swaps the hardware, but the program on the spare is two years old. With a current backup, the restore takes as long as the download. Without it, someone reconstructs the program from a laptop copy of unknown age and the line restarts on guesswork. The same logic now sits behind octoplant’s change detection and disaster recovery.

A North American installed base

AutoSave’s home market was North America. An Alpharetta company built its customer list in American and Canadian plants, though the 44 countries in Hg’s figures show it was never only North American. In our reading, much of AMDT’s North American base today traces back to AutoSave, just as much of its European base traces back to the sibling product, versiondog.

That base shapes the decision now. A large share of North American plants run on Rockwell controllers and software. For an AutoSave site that is heavily Rockwell, the end of support is a natural moment to weigh octoplant against FactoryTalk AssetCentre, which Rockwell sites may already license. A mixed-vendor site, with robots, drives and several PLC brands, has a stronger case for staying with a multi-vendor tool.

AutoSave for System Platform

AutoSave for System Platform was a variant for AVEVA System Platform, the supervisory software that many plants use for SCADA and plant-wide HMI. It ran on its own retirement schedule, separate from the main product’s phases. A post in the AVEVA Community, which AVEVA staff replied to, reports that AutoSave for System Platform completed AUVESY-MDT’s end-of-life process on 31 December 2025, that support ended from 1 January 2026, and that the last supported release is 2023. That is a community thread rather than an AMDT notice, so confirm it against your contract. For planning, treat it as unsupported now.

Why that matters. A System Platform configuration is not one file on one device. It holds the object model, scripts, graphics and security of a supervisory system, often across several servers. Losing it is a rebuild measured in weeks, not a restore measured in minutes. A plant that relied on AutoSave for System Platform and has not replaced it is now running its supervisory layer without a supported backup and versioning path.

The paths forward:

• octoplant. AVEVA is listed as an AMDT technology partner, and partner pages list AVEVA InTouch, System Platform and Plant SCADA among octoplant’s supported products (iOpen). Treat that list as an example and confirm your version against AMDT’s current support matrix
• AVEVA’s own tooling for exporting and backing up a System Platform configuration, under a disciplined manual process
• A combination: the vendor tool for routine backups, and an independent copy in a second location

The wider context for supervisory systems is on our SCADA and historians page, and octoplant’s SCADA coverage is on SCADA, HMI, network and PCs.

What carried into octoplant

AutoSave element	In octoplant	What to check
Scheduled backups	Automated device backup through jobs, unlimited under octoplant licensing	Job schedules and alert recipients after the move
Change detection	Change detection and alerts, with Smart Compare for the detail	That compares against migrated versions behave as expected
Version history	AMDT offers Migration & Expansion services for the move	That full history arrives, not only the latest version
Disaster recovery	Pattern-based or per-device recovery	A test restore of a critical device before go-live
Device support	Added to octoplant only; AMDT states 180+ device types	Your devices against the current matrix
System Platform variant	System Platform listed among supported products on partner pages	Your System Platform version
Licences	Per device, one licence per campus; Core, Plus and Premium editions	Device count against the edition thresholds

Sources: octoplant pricing, amdt.com, About octoplant.

Where it gets hard

Coverage has been frozen since 2025. In the limited-support phase, new device and editor support stopped. A plant that has upgraded engineering software or added new equipment since then may have devices AutoSave never properly captured, while the jobs it can still run keep reporting success.

Supervisory systems fall through the gap. Teams tend to think of AutoSave as a PLC tool. The System Platform variant has its own end of life, and nobody may have noticed.

Two tools on one site. New licences have been octoplant only since 2023, so expansions often run on octoplant while older lines stay on AutoSave. During a breakdown, a technician has to know which tool holds which machine.

Restore drills were rare. Many plants checked that AutoSave jobs ran, not that a restore worked. Before relying on a migrated archive, restore at least one critical device of each type from it. A backup nobody has restored is a hypothesis, whichever tool holds it.

The history is easy to undervalue. It is the record of why a program looks the way it does. Confirm on a pilot that it migrates, as covered on Migration to octoplant.

Back to versiondog and AutoSave or the AMDT hub.