[mythtv-users] import / export between systems

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:53:46 +0100, you wrote:

>HI All,
>
>I have setup a new Mythtv system with a view to moving my old recordings to
>it.  I have done this in the past by mounting the drive with all my
>recordings, and then just restoring the DB and running mythsetup that then
>promptly upgrades it.
>
>However as my old system stopped recording some channels we have recordings
>on both.
>
>How can I export recordings from new, trash the new one and import from
>old, upgrade mythversion/db, and then re-import the new recordings?
>
>Not sure a DB backup/restore will work as doing the 2nd import will blat
>the older (upgraded) data.
>
>Pretty sure there used to be a away of exporting the dbdata and files and
>then reimporting them?
>
>Ideas?
>
>Greg

Take a look at Mythexport's "On The Go" export option.  This first
creates a .sql file in the export directory that contains all the data
for the programs to be exported, then starts copying the files to the
export directory, so you can just kill it when it starts copying the
first file and then you will have a .sql file that you can use
mythimport on to import into the new system.  Mount the hard drives
from the old system with all the program files on them onto the new
system and add them to your storage groups and that should be all that
you need.

However, mythexport/mythimport will only export between systems
running the same version of MythTV.  So you may need to do an install
of the old version of MythTV on a spare partition or hard drive
somewhere, copy the old database onto it, then upgrade to the same
MythTV version as the new system, then run Mythexport.  There is no
need for the actual program files to be present on this system for
mythexport to work - it will just try to find them and fail, but that
is after it has exported all the data you want to the .sql file.

Or you could do it by using mythexport on the new system to save all
the data about the new programs, then copying the old system's
database onto the new system and getting it upgraded, then running
mythimport to recover the data about all the new programs.  Doing that
assumes that the configuration of the new system is compatible with
the old - you would lose any new settings you have done on the new
system.

It is also best that the export and import systems have the same
channel setups.  If they do not, you wind up with programs being
labeled with "#<chanid>" instead of "<channel name>" where there are
missing channels, and with the wrong channel name where the same
channel.chanid value is present in both systems but refers to a
different channel.  But it does still work even with different setups.