Why did my entire setup vanish when I started the sage service?

[btrcp2000]

This is more of a "make me smarter" question than a whine, but here's what happened:

Had installed 6.2.7 for giggles to see if it would help vista work better with my MVPs. It was up and running just fine with my most recent setup, channels, etc., but the mvps still froze as always. I had read somewhere in here about the "new" (or new to me, as I hadn't noticed it before) option of running sage as a service, so I enabled and started it via the app I found in the sage folder. The next time I started Sage UI, it wanted to run me through the entire setup again, starting with my country.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter, as it looks like I am headed for a full reinstall back to XP to make my mvps happy, but I have two questions:

1. How do I know when this will be triggered so I can avoid or at least plan for it?
2. What is the best way to keep a constant backup incase of an oopsie?

tia

[Opus4]

It sounds like the SageTV UI is not running in admin mode (or the service?), so they either can't talk to each other, or the service is not able to see the previous setup files from before service mode was enabled.

Normally, it doesn't matter whether you run in service mode or not: they will both use the same configuration data files & you won't need to reconfigure after turhning service mode on or off.

I thought the newer versions of SageTV would handle that on Vista... maybe the user permissions have been changed on your Vista configuration or maybe SageTV still needs to do something regarding those permissions. You could try filing a bug report to see what is suggested, or perhaps another Vista user will have a suggestion.

In terms of files to backup... that is normally wiz.bin (recordings/epg/import data) and sage.properties (configuration data). There is a FAQ or 2 about those files & a sticky thread in this forum about backing up a SageTV installation... but Vista can save the files somewhere else, so copying the SagetV install dir may not save those files.

- Andy

[Razillian]

It always seemed to me that if Sage is NOT running in service mode all it's settings come from the sage.properties file. But if Sage IS running in service mode, the service uses the sage.properties file, but the actual sage gui program uses the sageclient.properties file for its settings. Is my observation on this wrong? Could that be the reason it jumped into the setup wizard, because the client properties were never setup before?

[Opus4]

Yeah, that could be all it was. Now that I read the first post again, maybe I misunderstood... I thought it went through the entire setup, including setting up the tuners, but it looks like maybe I read too much into it & made it sound more difficult than it was because I'm remembering when the UI couldn't talk to the service sometimes in Vista. If all it did was configure some UI options, then it was just the client setup.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

The first time you run a new client of any sort, it will go through the client-specific part of the setup wizard in order to configure settings for that client. Switching to service mode for the first time makes the server GUI look like a new client, since it's now running in a separate process using a separate properties file.

[btrcp2000]

Okay, that might be it. It was 1am after another marathon evening of learning/tweaking, so once I saw that it was gone, I ran up the white flag and went to bed. Never got all the way to server things like channel setup, but I did notice that my sagemc folder was still there, so I guess it didn't wipe out everything. I'll play some more tonight. thanks to all for answering my questions!