What to backup and how

[zubblwump]

I've done a fair bit of searching the forum and found bits and pieces of what I need in various threads. Thought maybe someone in the know could help summarize things a bit for me.

What files should I backup? As far as I can tell the Sage.Properties, Wiz.bin, and Wiz.bak are the important ones.

Is the Wiz.bak just a copy of the Wiz.bin? I ran into a situation using SyncBack in which the backup would fail on the Wiz.bin if the SageTV Service was running. I can avoid this by backing up the Wiz.bak only instead of both, but would I get the same thing? When are these files updated?

The reason for all this is that in the past two weeks I've had the Wiz.bin get corrupted twice, and it seems to take the Wiz.bak with it. Luckily I've been able to restore a copy of the Wiz.bin I had stored off somewhere from about a month ago, and since I haven't done that much recording recently while all my shows are on a bit of hiatus for the holidays, I didn't lose too much.

Regarding the "how" of my question: Right now I’m storing a weeks worth of daily backups and then weeklies and monthlies for a period of time, which I can do with SyncBack, but is there a better/more elegant/more robust solution? I recall reading a post that the user was using Datakeeper to do real-time backups. I have this program as well, although I've never used it. Should I be?

Regardless of the tool, is there a way to backup the Wiz.bin while Sage is running, or should this be avoided?

Anything else I should be aware of related to backing up these files?

Appreciate any help you guys care to offer.

[SHS]

Usely you need back up the Wiz.bak, Wiz.bin and Sage.Properties files.
That way if you do new install you only need copy back in SageTV folder.

[zubblwump]

Originally Posted by SHS

Usely you need back up the Wiz.bak, Wiz.bin and Sage.Properties files.
That way if you do new install you only need copy back in SageTV folder.

Both Wiz.bin and Wiz.bak? Are these copies of each other or do they somehow need eachother to work?

[zubblwump]

Still need a bit of direction, guys. Is there a way to safely backup the Wiz.bin while Sage is running? I'm using the Service and it's always on. Ideally, I'd like to have the system know when sage is idle (no recording or watching) and temporarily shut down the service, make the backup, then restart it. Regarding the use of datakeeper, since it backs files up continuoulsly as they are changed, doesn't this cause a problem when Sage is running?

Or should I forget about the Wiz.bin and just backup the Wiz.bak?

[Toddly]

Personally, I backup the entire Sage TV folder. I find it easier and never had an prompt that the wiz.bin file could not be copied. I run the service as well.

[BobPhoenix]

Here is a script I cobbled together from some that I found on a couple of sites. It is a batch file that is sceduled to run every 12 hours on my machine at 10:14am and pm. Note it has a bug it must run when you have a 2 digit hour so after 10:00 on a 24 hour clock. Also as coded it creates a directory for each backup that has a name: YYYY-MM-DD-HR-MN. It copies the WIZ.* files and *.properties files but could easily be expanded to include more files. It also must be in the root of the directory where the backup directories are created and a sub-directory of "Program Files\Frey Technologies". I called my folder "backups" and this script "BACKUP.CMD". So the execution path for it is: "c:\Program Files\Frey Technologies\backups\backup.cmd".

Anyway here is the script(between the =========== lines):
==========================================
@echo off
:settime

set mytime=%time%
set DT_HOUR=%mytime:~0,2%
set DT_MIN=%mytime:~3,2%

:setdate

for /F "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%i IN ('date /t') DO (
set DT_DAY=%%i
set DT_MM=%%j
set DT_DD=%%k
set DT_YYYY=%%l)

set Bkup=%DT_YYYY%-%DT_MM%-%DT_DD%-%DT_HOUR%-%DT_MIN%

MD %Bkup%
COPY ..\Sagetv\*.properties %Bkup%\*.*
COPY ..\Sagetv\wiz.* %Bkup%\*.*

for %%v in (DT_HOUR DT_MIN) do set %%v=
for %%v in (DT_DAY DT_MM DT_DD DT_YYYY) do set %%v=

set mytime=
set Bkup=
=============================================

If you make improvements post back here.

BobP.