Transferring Recordings and Settings to New Server

[reggie14]

I’m getting ready to move Sage over to a new server for the first time in 4.5 years. I’m a little worried about getting everything right. I realize there’s an FAQ entry on this, but I have a couple more specific questions. I’ve reformatted several times over the last 4.5 years, but my way of getting Sage back to normal involved installing Sage, then overwriting the Sage directory with my old directory. I bet I can’t do that this time.

Here’s my plan for transferring my recordings. I’m going to switch over to UNC paths before I do the switch, then I’ll recreate those same UNC paths on the new server. I’ll name the new server the same name as my current server (which is going away). After that I’ll follow the steps in the new FAQ entry.

I’d also like to transfer over as many settings as possible. I know I have to transfer over my wiz.bin file for the recordings. Beyond that, mainly I’d like to avoid rescanning for QAM channels and remapping them. Where is that information stored, and is it easy to transfer over?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I’m getting ready to move Sage over to a new server for the first time in 4.5 years. I’m a little worried about getting everything right. I realize there’s an FAQ entry on this, but I have a couple more specific questions. I’ve reformatted several times over the last 4.5 years, but my way of getting Sage back to normal involved installing Sage, then overwriting the Sage directory with my old directory. I bet I can’t do that this time.

1) Why not?
2) All you need is the wiz.bin and the *.properties files to restore your settings/database.

Here’s my plan for transferring my recordings. I’m going to switch over to UNC paths before I do the switch, then I’ll recreate those same UNC paths on the new server. I’ll name the new server the same name as my current server (which is going away). After that I’ll follow the steps in the new FAQ entry.

You could do that after so long as the recording drive letters are the same, and change to UNC Paths afterwards.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

1) Why not?
2) All you need is the wiz.bin and the *.properties files to restore your settings/database.

I don't have any particular reason for thinking I couldn't just copy the whole directory over. I just assumed there were some hardware-specific things in it that might not like a motherboard change. The FAQ indicated that you shouldn't copy the properties file over, which made me think you shouldn't copy the whole directory over. I suppose by copying the whole directory you don't need to worry about plug-ins not being there.

But, if that does work, then that makes things a lot easier.

By the way, how careful do I need to be with codecs? If Sage was previously set up to use the PureVideo decoder, but I don't install it on the new system, will Sage automatically switch back to the system default?

You could do that after so long as the recording drive letters are the same, and change to UNC Paths afterwards.

That's actually why I was going to switch to UNC paths before making the server switch- one of my hard drives won't be making the switch. I know there's workarounds for that problem, like temporarily looking up a usb drive, but it seems easier just to switch to UNC paths now and not have to worry about things like that later.

[GKusnick]

Be careful with Sage.properties. It contains hardware-specific information related to your old server, and file paths related to your old installation. If your capture devices get assigned different device IDs on your new hardware, or if you install Sage into a different directory (e.g. Program Files\SageTV instead of Program Files\Frey Technologies), those old settings could cause problems.

If channel remapping is your primary concern, I'd suggest starting with a fresh Sage.properties, configuring everything but the channel mappings through the UI, and then copying over just the specific property entries related to channel mapping. (I'm not a channel mapping expert so I can't tell you which ones those are off the top of my head, but it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out by doing a few remappings by hand and comparing before-and-after snapshots of Sage.properties to see what changed.)

[stanger89]

Yeah, forgot the tuner info/ids.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

If channel remapping is your primary concern, I'd suggest starting with a fresh Sage.properties, configuring everything but the channel mappings through the UI, and then copying over just the specific property entries related to channel mapping.

OK. That seems reasonable. Its not that hard to redo if it comes to that, so its not a big deal. I suppose I can handle doing the remapping over again every 4 years or so. Thanks.