Channels and EPG lost - backup and restore possible?

[kenfox]

Yesterday, all of a sudden I lost all my channels and EPG. This should not happen, since it's quite a few work to create a nice channel lineup and it's a scary prospect having channels vanishing from time to time.

Is there a way to backup the channel lineup and restore it quickly in such case? Where is the lineup stored, anyway?

Ken

[tvmaster2]

funny - I lost all my favorites yesterday, and because I couldn't find the answer here, had to do a complete rebuild, which I'm still doing. Something happened yesterday, but I don't know what

[rnadeau]

Don't know if this is related but my printer along with thousands of other people's printers stopped working yesterday because of google cloud print update. disabling cloud print in printer and chrome fixed it.

[Narflex]

If you lose your stuff like this...also remember that everytime you upgrade SageTV it makes a backup of the Wiz.bin and Sage.properties files....so you'll usually have plenty lying around.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Narflex

If you lose your stuff like this...also remember that everytime you upgrade SageTV it makes a backup of the Wiz.bin and Sage.properties files....so you'll usually have plenty lying around.

Okay. I think.
At what point are the respective backups made - continually? If the primary gets corrupted, wouldn't the backup be corrupted as well, or is there some kind of delay? And other than going from v. 7 to v. 9 (which I haven't yet), v. 7 hasn't been upgraded in a while, has it?
thanks

[kenfox]

Now, I've set up a cron job, which makes a backup every day.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by kenfox

Now, I've set up a cron job, which makes a backup every day.

a backup of what in particular?

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

a backup of what in particular?

I actually have a script that backs up my properties file and Wiz.bin file everytime I startup SageTV (since I don't restart it all that often).

On Linux, if you have any scripts in the SageTV folder that start with 'presage' then those will get executed before SageTV launches (that is done in startsagecore).

It's as simple as this:

cp Wiz.bin Wiz.bin.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`
cp Sage.properties Sage.properties.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`

And corruption of the Wiz file should NOT be happening ever. This is one of the worst things that can go wrong in my opinion (aside from deleting all your files, which should of course never happen either). So if anybody does end up with a corrupted Wiz.bin file, I'm more than happy to take a look at why it happened.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Narflex

I actually have a script that backs up my properties file and Wiz.bin file everytime I startup SageTV (since I don't restart it all that often).

On Linux, if you have any scripts in the SageTV folder that start with 'presage' then those will get executed before SageTV launches (that is done in startsagecore).

It's as simple as this:

cp Wiz.bin Wiz.bin.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`
cp Sage.properties Sage.properties.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`

And corruption of the Wiz file should NOT be happening ever. This is one of the worst things that can go wrong in my opinion (aside from deleting all your files, which should of course never happen either). So if anybody does end up with a corrupted Wiz.bin file, I'm more than happy to take a look at why it happened.

I think I made a copy of the wiz.bin, or / and it's backup just before everything went to hell (aka my favorites failed to be recognized). Where would you like me to send them, and I'd pack them into a single zip file, yes?
Thanks

[pjwerdna]

Originally Posted by kenfox

Now, I've set up a cron job, which makes a backup every day.

Id suggest keeping the backups at least until you do the next reboot. I had a corrupt wiz.bin a few years ago and found that all 8 backups I had going back 16 days were each marked by SageTV as corrupt when I restarted the service to try them. I ended up having to use the backup from the last SageTV Upgrade.

I now keep the backups forever and had a UPS.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

I think I made a copy of the wiz.bin, or / and it's backup just before everything went to hell (aka my favorites failed to be recognized). Where would you like me to send them, and I'd pack them into a single zip file, yes?
Thanks

You can just upload it somewhere and then PM me a link to it. I only need the Wiz.bin...and I'm only interested in it if SageTV says it is corrupt when it loads it...otherwise there really isn't anything to debug.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Narflex

You can just upload it somewhere and then PM me a link to it. I only need the Wiz.bin...and I'm only interested in it if SageTV says it is corrupt when it loads it...otherwise there really isn't anything to debug.

Ok, Sage did not make mention anywhere I saw noting 'corrupt'. Sage just wouldn't use the favorites to schedule recordings. The only thing that corrected the problem was deleting wiz.bin, restarting Sage, and building from scratch.
I tried to delete and recreate the favorites first, but that did nothing, aka 'Scheduled Recordings' just showed up empty.

[kenfox]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

a backup of what in particular?

Wiz.bin and Sage.properties. I back them up with date stamp.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Ok, Sage did not make mention anywhere I saw noting 'corrupt'. Sage just wouldn't use the favorites to schedule recordings. The only thing that corrected the problem was deleting wiz.bin, restarting Sage, and building from scratch.
I tried to delete and recreate the favorites first, but that did nothing, aka 'Scheduled Recordings' just showed up empty.

Oh, OK....then for that I would first want to see a log file...because I'd assume that the Scheduler thread wasn't executing properly for some reason or Carny had some kind of weird error. Carny is what determines the Airings that should be recorded for Favorites and Intelligent Recording; it then passes that off to the Scheduler which actually figures out what tuners should be recording them. Scheduler passes that data to Seeker which actually controls all of the tuners (and handles all playback requests). The log should show something failing somewhere...and if not...then we'll just need to get Java thread dumps to figure out where something is hung up at.