Hi there,

I have a my /myth/video and /myth/tv dirs symbolically linked to /data/video and /data/tv respectively. /data is a the mount point for a large (400G) external disk.

(There is a reason why - to do with preserving lots of tv and video data when moving to knoppmyth from std mythtv install.)

I'm currently running R5A15.1, and I am looking to upgrade to R5A26.

My question is:
will the upgrade preserve my video and tv data given the symbolic links above?

Many thanks for your help.
Paul.

On an a auto-upgrade, /dev/hda1 (/) is wiped clean. So the question is where do you have those symlinks?

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Hi there - thanks for getting back to me.

My structure is as follows:


On the internal disk:
root and home are on /dev/hda1 (3.5GB)
/myth is on /dev/hda4 (150GB)
/cache is on /dev/hda3 (10GB)

On the external disk:
/data is on /dev/sda1 (400GB)

Looking at /myth, you can see the links:


If I understand you, /dev/hda1 is wiped, but /dev/hda3 and 4 will remain unchanged. Therefore, my symbolic links in /myth will be preserved.

However, since the external disk is mounted at /data - the mount point will disappear. So the symbolic links /myth/tv and /myth/video will point to nothing.

As an aside, is it possible to change just the TV and VIDEO directories inside myth?

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

You can change any MythTV configuration you want. I'd suggest reading the MythTV docs is you have questions.

Thanks - will do.

So to conclude:
- my video and TV data is on an external disk
- that disk is mounted on /data.
- /data will disappear during upgrade as /dev/hda1 is overwritten. The mount table will be replaced (right?) and the mount point will be deleted. The actual information on the external disk will not be touched.

I think my question still stands:
- how does one preserve tv/video data on an external disk during upgrade?

Is the correct answer that I just do the upgrade, after which all the TV and video DB entries will point nowhere, then remount the external disk. Does the upgrade process check for Recordings and Videos that have missing data?

(excuse my pickiness here - I want to be very careful not to lose this data. When I switched to knoppmyth from building mythtv myself, I had to manually reinsert all recordings for the kids saved stuff. What a pain!)

Thanks again for your help.
Cheers.
Paul.

Since that disk won't be touched by the upgrade, and the MythTV code refuses to delete program entries from the database when it can't find the file on disk for exactly this reason, you don't have to do anything to preserve it. Also, during an upgrade even the /myth partition isn't touched so your links should still be there.

To access it, save your current /etc/fstab and after recreating the mount point, either copy it back over or just cut and paste the entry for your data disk into the the post upgrade /etc/fstab.

You can even just use the following sequence of post-upgrade commands as root.

Thank you kindly for your help.
Paul.

Well - I completed the upgrade tonite, and I can report some emperical results:

a) symbolic links were preserved. So on reboot just remounted the /data partition (great)
b) all information in mythtv-setup is gone (channels, cards etc). Not a problem as its trivial to fix. however if the plan is to trash this data, we probably should run mythtv-setup after upgrade. (not so great)
b) all information about music, videos and recorded tv programs is gone from the database (major bummer).

After reboot, I remounted the external disk. Then checked the database, and "select * from recorded" gets nothing. From the front end, all music and video were empty until I rescanned music and video. bummer is that all the IMDB data and hand entered data is lost.

Even worse is the loss of all information about recorded programs - I had a lot of the kids and S.O's programs in there, they will be royally p.o.'d when I break the news tomorrow morning. I'm looking at trying to manually reenter this data... ick.

Is this a bug? If so is a pretty yukky one.

I was upgrading from 15.1 to 26.

Is it possible to reverse the upgrade? I did do a backup prior to upgrading.

(sigh) I'm going to bed - this is one I need to walk away from for a day or so...

Yours unhappily.
Paul.

Did you remember to do a backup (using /usr/local/bin/mythbackup)? This is called out quite clearly in the upgrade instructions: http://www.mysettopbox.tv/doc.html#autoupgrade and http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=KnoppMythInstall#autoupgrade

If you have a backup the upgrade should restore from it automatically. I've typically got well over 100 recordings and 1000 songs on the KnoppMyth box and they come through every upgrade just fine. If you actually did do a backup, which wasn't restored by the upgrade for some reason, you can always run the restore (using /usr/local/bin/mythrestore) manually.

Hey there,

Yes I did the backup - but I used backup from the Knoppmyth menu. I remember reading that it was the same. Of course the command line is better - you are sure to see if there were errors.

When I restore now - it blanks the DB. So I assume my backup failed.

Sigh. Nearly there with a manual restore.
Thanks
Paul.

Correct on both counts.

Ugh... Have you looked in the /myth/backup directory to see if there is anything in the mythconverg.sql file? Were there any errors produced by the restore? I'm wondering if you can just pull out the data for the recorded programs and maybe the settings and feed them in mysql since everything else can be reconstructed.

Checked - the backup file exists, but is empty! Interestingly an old backup file (mythconverg.sql.bak) is there from June with valid data. Its old but I should be able to copy some lines from it for some of the 'recorded' data.

Thanks for the hints. Note for the future - dont use the GUI backup, use the command line one.

So sorry to hear that. Rotten luck...

Yeah, or check the file. I'm very paranoid about this myself...