Lost recordings database

[keith_leitch]

Groan.

Tonight I am reformatting my recordings drive to take advantage of a larger cluster size. I carefully backed up the recordings drive, repartitioned, reformatted and restored the backed up files. Unfortunately (and I should have thought of this) the GBPVR database updated itself while there was nothing on the drive. No, I didn't back up the database before I started. I do have a full system backup from early this morning, and GBPVR is on the system drive, but that seems like a draconian measure if I can avoid it. Is there anything else I can try?

[keith_leitch]

pBS, Image for Windows is the greatest program ever written. Thanks again for suggesting it. I don't know how it can possibly do a sector-by-sector backup and still be able to restore a single file, but that is what it just did for me now. I have a copy of the database as of 6:00 this morning.

[leaded1]

with the latest release, you should have multiple saved recording-dump.xml backups. If any of these contain all of your recordings, you can re-import them (should also include all of your recurring recordings).

[Graham]

DVR-MS recording files contain an alternate data stream that contains most (if not all) of the data stored in the database. There are utilities that can rebuild the database from this data. I tried a quick grope in the wiki and found only this ...

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/VidImport

You should find others if you search the wiki and forum.

I dunno if .ts or .mpg recording files have alternate data streams.

[sub]

DVR-MS recording files contain an alternate data stream that contains most (if not all) of the data stored in the database.

Its not specifically related to .dvr-ms files. This feature is available on all recordings made by GB-PVR, but only on NTFS drives.

[keith_leitch]

Interesting. As you've seen, I solved the problem via a backup, but I'd like to know more about this. I use vidimport regularly, but all it gives me is the show's main title, the times set for recording (from the filename) and, occasionally, a generic description scraped from IMDB (sometimes with the HTML tags still attached).

[pBS]

true, there should be recording-dump.0-9 in gbpvr folder as well...should be only missing a day's recordings..
but if not, here's a little batch file to import back in the ntfs metadata on each file..
it should make them all look exactly like they used to in recordings screen..
save as batch file, and place in root of recordings dir you want to import and run it..
Now adjusts filename path on the fly to correct rec dir changes!

RecoverRecordings.bat

Code:

@echo off
setlocal ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
echo.
echo. Generating Recording Import data for all .mpg's in
echo.     %~dp0recording-dump.xml
echo.
echo ^<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?^> > %~dp0recording-dump.xml
echo ^<recordings^> >>%~dp0recording-dump.xml
FOR /R %~dp0 %%f IN (*.mpg *.ts *.dvr-ms *.avi) DO (call :extract "%%~f")
echo ^</recordings^> >> %~dp0recording-dump.xml

echo.
echo Done.
echo.
echo Hit any key to import into database or 'Control-c' to exit and edit recording-dump.xml.
pause
for /f "usebackq skip=4 tokens=1,2,3,* " %%a in (`reg query hklm\SOFTWARE\devnz /v "GBPVR InstallDir"`) do set gbpvrdir=%%d
"%gbpvrdir%pvrx2.exe" -import:"%~dp0recording-dump.xml"
echo Importing....
echo Done.
goto :eof


:extract
echo ""
for /f "usebackq tokens=* skip=1 delims=*" %%p in ("%~1:metadata.xml") do (
set line=%%p
if "!line:filename=!" NEQ "!line!" (    
    echo       ^<filename^>%~1^</filename^> >> "%~dp0recording-dump.xml"
    ) else (echo    %%p >> "%~dp0recording-dump.xml")
)
goto :eof

New Wiki entry for it:
http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utili...Recordings
apparently it got deleted in house cleaning of the forums..

[keith_leitch]

Good, thanks. I'll play with this and see if it makes a difference to my vidimports.

One thing that didn't get restored with the database was the resume times for videos. (I'm talking about videos in the external library, here, not recordings). How are these managed?

[gEd]

There is a table in the gbpvr.db database that recordings to resume point of a given file.

[keith_leitch]

I've seen a few posts that use VidImport to reproduce the GBPVR database from a file's metadata. I have just created a batch file that uses SQLite to do the opposite; restores a file's metadata from the GBPVR database. I needed this because I "mess" with many of my files, but it might be handy for someone who copied them through a FAT32 system, for example. Let me know if anyone needs it.