Recovering from Corrupt Wiz.bin

[reggie14]

I came home tonight to find my wiz.bin was (apparently) corrupted. I first noticed that things weren't set to record that should have been, and then noticed I lost all my favorites and watched status information. I saw my wiz.bin file is about half the size it was, and I now have a wiz.bin.corrupt1 file in my Sage directory.

I have some backups, but they're kind of old. I have one from yesterday, but I suspect its corrupt. The one before that is about a week old (grrr).

I don't want to touch my Sage box now, because I have recordings going on for the next few hours.

Is there anything i should know before I try to recover? I imagine I should start by closing Sage (and the service) and renaming wiz.bin.bak. If that doesn't work, I fall back on my backups.

Will I have any problems with my recordings since the wiz.bin failure?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I came home tonight to find my wiz.bin was (apparently) corrupted. I first noticed that things weren't set to record that should have been, and then noticed I lost all my favorites and watched status information. I saw my wiz.bin file is about half the size it was, and I now have a wiz.bin.corrupt1 file in my Sage directory.

I have some backups, but they're kind of old. I have one from yesterday, but I suspect its corrupt. The one before that is about a week old (grrr).

I don't want to touch my Sage box now, because I have recordings going on for the next few hours.

Is there anything i should know before I try to recover? I imagine I should start by closing Sage (and the service) and renaming wiz.bin.bak. If that doesn't work, I fall back on my backups.

Will I have any problems with my recordings since the wiz.bin failure?

Maybe you guys that are getting corrupt wiz.bin should compare notes. Like what plugins are Installed are you using drive cache etc....

[reggie14]

Maybe... It seemed to happen when my machine applied OS updates, though. So, until it happens again I'm not overly concerned.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Maybe... It seemed to happen when my machine applied OS updates, though. So, until it happens again I'm not overly concerned.

My solution to that would be to completely turn off the automatic updates. Then when I want to update - shutdown SageTV including the service and do all updates - java and OS - with it shut down. Once all updates are done installing - reboot and start SageTV service mode again.

[reggie14]

I had updates turned off for a while, but I didn't like how out-of-date my server would get. Maybe I'll go back to turning it off, but probably only if I have the problem again.

Did my process for trying to recovery from the wiz.bin failure make sense?

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I had updates turned off for a while, but I didn't like how out-of-date my server would get. Maybe I'll go back to turning it off, but probably only if I have the problem again.

Did my process for trying to recovery from the wiz.bin failure make sense?

Sure. I have backups for my servers quite a ways back - some more than others. I've had corrupt wiz.bin's before and I just kept going back in time until I got one that worked. I've also reinstalled SageTV from scratch and copied in the most recent backup when I can't or don't want to go back too far. So far that seems to have fixed any I had - but then again I haven't had any since SageTV V6 either.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I had updates turned off for a while, but I didn't like how out-of-date my server would get. Maybe I'll go back to turning it off, but probably only if I have the problem again.

Did my process for trying to recovery from the wiz.bin failure make sense?

The only problem with going to an older wiz.bin backup (and there is really no way around it if the current one is corrupted), is that you will lose any information or changes made in the time since the older backup was created. Such as... If you watched some shows and deleted them, Sage won't know you watched them and may record them again the next time they are on. Or... If you added or deleted any favorites or changed favorite priorities or other settings, those changes would be lost. Also, you may not have any current EPG data right away (will have to wait for it to update - though this shouldn't take too long).

The other thing you may encounter is if you were using any plugins that stored data in wiz.bin (I think some of the metadata-related plugins do this) some of that information may be lost (I'm thinking this might cause a symptom like incorrect fan art being displayed or something).

[reggie14]

Unfortunately, my last 4 backups appear to be corrupt too, which is odd... Is there anything else that could be going on here?

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Update: I eventually found one that worked, but I had to go two weeks back. And I haven't looked around enough to see how much damage was done. That's weird.

And, of course, while I had been religiously taking backups, I haven't done since I built my new system yet. I had been using Acronis Backup and Recovery, but I've gotten fed up with the buggy versions that have plagued the Backup and Recovery line since version 10 was released. Acronis clearly doesn't care about that line. I've been trying to decide between ShadowProtect Desktop and True Image. TrueImage is much cheaper, but I'm not sure how much I trust Acronis at this point

[doc]

I had to use a backup wiz.bin 3 or 4 days ago because it was corrupt. I've just stopped and started the sage service and its now corrupt again and I haven't done any windows updates since, so that eliminates that.

My Sage machine has been stable for years. I do the regular plugin updates (web interface/bmt etc). I don't know if an update to one of those has caused issues.

I eventually found a wiz.bin from Sunday 31st March that seems to be working ok. I do all my plugin updates over a weekend as I work away in the week. I don't know whether or not I did any updates that weekend.

The only other thing I've done recently is start watching Wedding Band!

I'm going to reinstall now and see how I get on.

EDIT: Just remembered there was a system message about a corrupt playlist. As I don't use sage for music I'll stop importing it