2018-05-17, 02:55 AM
TLDR: I have multiple TB of shows NextPVR forgot about because I disconnected an external drive it was recording to for a long time, not realizing the default was to forget/delete from the DB missing shows. I did not have a backup of the recording-backup.xml file from before this happened! How can I easily - without having to manually add each individual video file - get those recordings loaded back into NPVR?
I've had NextPVR set up for some about 18 months, but haven't followed through on all the proper ways to use it... I know I should have read the manual... but I just read what I needed when I needed and mostly just muddled through and figured it all out myself with limited internet guides (it was a headache to get the video playback working on Windows 10 without the native mpeg-1 stream codecs!)
I've filled up most of an external 4TB drive (D:\RecordedTV for the sake of argument), though, and have been properly viewing content via various clients (mostly Kodi, which took a little jiggering to get it working as desired but I'm now happily leveraging Kodi across numerous devices in my household from Android tablets to iPhones to old Macs to new PCs to FireTV sticks, and am overall happy enough with the experience.)
One thing I'm not happy about, though, is that, in preparation for a storage upgrade, moving my content from the 4TB drive to a newer, bigger drive, I shut down my NextPVR PC and disconnected the drive during a time when I wasn't anticipating any new recordings. Then I realized I needed to get some other data off the NextPVR PC - data not residing on the external 4TB drive, so I fired the PC up, pulled the data I needed, left it running.
Days pass, a show comes up that I needed to record manually, that went into C:\Users\Public\Videos as my secondary folder. That show and a couple of others are all that's there. "Neat," I think, "It knows to only show me what it can find."
I finally get around to reconnecting my 4TB drive so I can migrate the content over to my larger new RAID volume, load up NextPVR and... nothing. Those shows still aren't there.
It looks like I can manually re-import them one at a time, but we're talking about hundreds of episodes. I'm contemplating writing a powershell script to parse the subfolders for all the xml files and to essentially create my own faked "backup" recording-backup.xml file to import (once I copy everything over to the new volume) but I'll loose a little information (it looks like more info is stored in the recording-backup.xml like actors and crew info than just the individual episodes' showname.seasonnumber.episodenumber.episodetitle.xml file, but it looks like I can at least get the synopsis.)
However, I'd rather not write a script if I don't have to - surely someone else has already encountered and solved this problem? I'm thinking I must just be missing a feature like "Scan target folder for existing recordings to import" hidden away somewhere.
And, barring that, what would have been the right way to a) migrate to a new drive b) migrate to a new PC?
I've had NextPVR set up for some about 18 months, but haven't followed through on all the proper ways to use it... I know I should have read the manual... but I just read what I needed when I needed and mostly just muddled through and figured it all out myself with limited internet guides (it was a headache to get the video playback working on Windows 10 without the native mpeg-1 stream codecs!)
I've filled up most of an external 4TB drive (D:\RecordedTV for the sake of argument), though, and have been properly viewing content via various clients (mostly Kodi, which took a little jiggering to get it working as desired but I'm now happily leveraging Kodi across numerous devices in my household from Android tablets to iPhones to old Macs to new PCs to FireTV sticks, and am overall happy enough with the experience.)
One thing I'm not happy about, though, is that, in preparation for a storage upgrade, moving my content from the 4TB drive to a newer, bigger drive, I shut down my NextPVR PC and disconnected the drive during a time when I wasn't anticipating any new recordings. Then I realized I needed to get some other data off the NextPVR PC - data not residing on the external 4TB drive, so I fired the PC up, pulled the data I needed, left it running.
Days pass, a show comes up that I needed to record manually, that went into C:\Users\Public\Videos as my secondary folder. That show and a couple of others are all that's there. "Neat," I think, "It knows to only show me what it can find."
I finally get around to reconnecting my 4TB drive so I can migrate the content over to my larger new RAID volume, load up NextPVR and... nothing. Those shows still aren't there.
It looks like I can manually re-import them one at a time, but we're talking about hundreds of episodes. I'm contemplating writing a powershell script to parse the subfolders for all the xml files and to essentially create my own faked "backup" recording-backup.xml file to import (once I copy everything over to the new volume) but I'll loose a little information (it looks like more info is stored in the recording-backup.xml like actors and crew info than just the individual episodes' showname.seasonnumber.episodenumber.episodetitle.xml file, but it looks like I can at least get the synopsis.)
However, I'd rather not write a script if I don't have to - surely someone else has already encountered and solved this problem? I'm thinking I must just be missing a feature like "Scan target folder for existing recordings to import" hidden away somewhere.
And, barring that, what would have been the right way to a) migrate to a new drive b) migrate to a new PC?
