[mythtv-users] backing up everything before a rebuild

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 11:56:27 -0500, you wrote:

>
>> On Feb 17, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:15:40 -0500, you wrote:
>> 
>>> I want to backup all my recorded TV shows and the database associated with them to a NAS and then completely rebuild the mythbuntu system.  I currently using 2 disks to split up the recording load.  I?l still be using 2 disks but they will be of different sizes.  I? also putting all the O/S stuff on a small SSD so the disks only have shows and movies.
>>> 
>>> What is the recommended method to do this safely without losing everything?
>>> 
>>> Jim A
>> 
>> Personally, I prefer the belt and braces approach.  I use the
>> mythconverg_backup.pl script in a cron job to back up the database
>> daily to another PC on my network.  It is also backed up weekly to
>> another drive on my MythTV PC.  Then when I am upgrading my Mythbuntu
>> system, I use clonezilla to backup my complete system partition to a
>> different hard drive on the same box.
>> 
>> If you do not already have regular scheduled backups of your database
>> happening, then that is the first thing you should get working, before
>> even considering an upgrade.  And you also need to have a cron job
>> running the optimize_db script daily also, as that prevents most
>> database crashes from happening.  Mythbuntu comes with cron scripts
>> for doing both backup and optimise, but for other systems, you may
>> need to do set that up yourself.
>> 
>
>I am using mythbuntu so I see the mythconverg-1317-20160202074835.sql.gz type files in /var/lib/mythtv/db_backup directory.

Excellent, you have the automatic weekly backups working.  However,
the default location for those backups in Mythbuntu is on the system
partition - I prefer to have mine on at least a different drive, as
they get bigger and bigger as your database grows and can fill up the
system partition.  So in my /etc/cron.weekly/mythtv-database file, I
changed the --directory option to point to one of my recording drives,
which will always have much more space.  And I also copied the
/etc/cron.weekly/mythtv-database file to
/etc/cron.daily/mythtv-database and in that one changed the
--directory option to point to my backups directory on my Windows box,
so that it also backs up daily on a different PC on the other side of
my house.  That backups directory is also manually backed up to an
external drive every so often (about monthly).

[snip]
>I really appreciate your details here. I looked at the Wiki but a lot of that is dated and assumes you know what you want to do.  I can do the tasks once I know what tasks I want to do.  Missing a step can be “deadly” to your data.  I copied all the recordings once and forgot the database so I lost those as far as Mythtv was concerned.
>
>I don’t guess there’s a script to go thru your recorded TV files and add them back into the database??

There is apparently an old script, probably very out of date, that
allows you to add any arbitrary recording file into the recordings
database.  I have never tried it.  But there is so much more data in
the database about a recording than just what that script does.  For
example, the data that is used to prevent it being re-recorded.  That
extra data is what makes MythTV such good software to use.  Once that
data is lost, the recommended way to access orphaned recording files
is to put them in a videos directory.  From there, you can play them
and work out what programme they are (and what series and episode) and
then rename the file to something in the right format for MythTV to
automatically get the metadata for that episode.  Or manually enter
the right settings to get the metadata.  But doing that is an
incredibly time-consuming exercise if you have more than just a very
few orphaned recording files.  I found that even a weeks worth of
recordings was too many to want to do that ever again, which is one
reason I went to daily backups of my database.

One thing I forgot to mention is that if you are doing a clean install
of Mythbuntu, make sure that you use the same hostname and IP address
settings as the old install did.  Changing hostname in a MythTV
database is possible, but it is one of those things it is best to
avoid if at all possible.