How do I save the favorites for a wipe-reinstall

[pat_smith1969]

I am pretty fed up with Sage at this point and am at the point I want to wipe sage off my drive and re-install it. I just can't get exemultituner to work, and enabeling debug error reports didn't create the log files it was supposed to. I can only conclude that my install is totally hozed, somehow. I just completed a complete OS re-install and sage TV install two months ago in hopes to be ready for the new TV season.

My plan is to wipe Sage off my hard drive and do a fresh install, in hopes that will fix my problems. To do this I MUST save my favorites list, if I lose that my wife will have a major cow. What files do I need to save to be able to save my favoites list?

[Enormous]

Save your Wiz.bin off to some other sort of physical media. That is where your favorites and watches status' are stored.

[FidgetyRat]

I believe, as long as you keep the newly formatted system using the same directory structure, simply copying the video files, the wiz.bin and the sage.properties and client.properties files should suffice.

Get a second opinion first though.

[ybrew]

What I've done was copy the ENTIRE sagetv directory.

I would strongly recommend that. Maybe you only need to copy a few files back in, but it doesn't hurt to copy the entire directory before wiping it.

I actually try to make at least monthly backups of that directory (although I should really try to do them more frequently).

[nielm]

My webserver can export favorites (and information for recordings) as xml files for later import, again via the webserver

[stevech]

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

I believe, as long as you keep the newly formatted system using the same directory structure, simply copying the video files, the wiz.bin and the sage.properties and client.properties files should suffice.

Get a second opinion first though.

That's been my experience. When Sage starts up, if the directories for video files are the same as when last sage was shut down, then you are OK. If none of the video recordings are there now, I believe that sage's wiz.bin will still retain your watched and favorites - they're just records in the database named wiz.bin.

You can also put your recordings into some other drive or directory. If when Sage starts up, the original drive letters (like E exist, on most any file system, sage will discover the moved recordings in the new directory. I just did this, moving recordings on three drives to a single raid drive. Then startup sage with the old wiz.bin, tell it about the new recordings directory and have the old drive letters still there. Then stop and start sage once more. For me, it found the old recordings in the new drive letter/path. Then remove the old drive letters from sage's recordings directories and the migration is done.

This is counter-intuitive, but it seemed to work.