Migrating from server --> server/client

[kltye]

I've been using Sage with a standalone machine, and now I'm thinking of migrating over to a server/client architecture - mostly for improved stability and reliability (I do too many things with my Sage machine :P)

The only problem is migrating my current videos. I want to move the drives containing my videos over to my server. I understand I can copy the wiz.bin file over as well, but the drive paths will not be the same. Is there any way I can remap the drive letters, and keep the episode info on my recordings?

Thanks!

[GKusnick]

If you're building a brand-new machine for the server, you should be able to map the drives (except your C drive) to any letters you like. If there's an optical drive taking up a letter you want, you can remap that too. Do this from Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Best to do this early, before you install any application software.

[kltye]

Unfortunately it's not a brand-new machine, and I do have some videos in my C: drive The C: drive for the server is only 40GB, which isn't large enough for contain my videos.

Can I actually "tell" wiz.bin that all my videos from my C: have moved over to another drive?

[KrisAcker]

Originally Posted by kltye

Unfortunately it's not a brand-new machine, and I do have some videos in my C: drive The C: drive for the server is only 40GB, which isn't large enough for contain my videos.

Can I actually "tell" wiz.bin that all my videos from my C: have moved over to another drive?

Yes, you can. But it's not that easy.

First you have to add the new location to your current setup using a UNC path. You then will have two recording locations in Sage, the currrent one where your recordings are now and the new one, which is empty. It is important that both locations exist or this will not work!

Next you close Sage and stop the service if you are using it. Then you copy the files from the old to the new location. When you are sure that the old recordings path exists without any recordings in it and the new path exists with the recordings in it and the new path is shared, you can restart Sage.

Your recordings wll now show up with the new recording path. After you verify this, remove the old recordings path from Sage. You can now move the wiz.bin to another computer in your network, the UNC path will still point to the new location.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR PROPERTIES FILE AND WIZ.BIN BEFORE DOING THIS!

[kltye]

Originally Posted by KrisAcker

Yes, you can. But it's not that easy.

First you have to add the new location to your current setup using a UNC path. You then will have two recording locations in Sage, the currrent one where your recordings are now and the new one, which is empty. It is important that both locations exist or this will not work!

Next you close Sage and stop the service if you are using it. Then you copy the files from the old to the new location. When you are sure that the old recordings path exists without any recordings in it and the new path exists with the recordings in it and the new path is shared, you can restart Sage.

Your recordings wll now show up with the new recording path. After you verify this, remove the old recordings path from Sage. You can now move the wiz.bin to another computer in your network, the UNC path will still point to the new location.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR PROPERTIES FILE AND WIZ.BIN BEFORE DOING THIS!

Oh so close! My only problem is (and it's my fault for not mentioning earlier) that I'm actually going to be moving the hard drives with the videos from my current machine into the server. Does this make it any easier, or more difficult? It would seem that wiz.bin is "smart" enough to figure out what the recordings are from the filename, if they are put in a Sage recording directory...

[KrisAcker]

Originally Posted by kltye

Oh so close! My only problem is (and it's my fault for not mentioning earlier) that I'm actually going to be moving the hard drives with the videos from my current machine into the server. Does this make it any easier, or more difficult? It would seem that wiz.bin is "smart" enough to figure out what the recordings are from the filename, if they are put in a Sage recording directory...

As far as I know Sage first needs to "see" that a file is no longer present in it's original recordings directory. If that directory is missing, the path stored in the wiz.bin for the recordings on that directory won't be changed.

[Opus4]

If the only drive you are worried about using w/o any videos is C, then there shouldn't be an issue, becuase the new PC ought to have a drive C, so it could see that no videos are there. For any other drive letters that the new PC doesn't have, simple map some empty dir to that drive letter to let SageTV see there are no recordings there & don't run in service mode while making this shift so SageTV can see mapped drives.

If you are using UNC paths, make sure the original UNC path is visible from the new PC. If the original path can't be visible (the old networked PC is gone), then switch away from UNC paths before making the PC move.

- Andy

[kltye]

Gotcha, so basically as long as Sage:

1) Sees the old recordings directory;
2) Sees that the directory does not contain the videos;
3) Sees a new recordings directory, and
4) Sees that the new directory has the videos

then wiz.bin will be updated to reflect the path change. I must say, this is really a smart piece of code

[kltye]

Alright, I finally did the migration, but basically wiz.bin wasn't updated to reflect the new paths on the server. I hit upon the "Problem accessing the filesystem for playback" error. Any ideas why this might be so?

Basically I have videos in c:\program files\frey technologies\sagetv\video that I now want to map to f:\videos. I created that directory in C:\ (which is empty) and have copied the files over to f:\videos. Sage still thinks that the video files are in c:\program files...

[Opus4]

You didn't actually do drive mapping & are using the service, did you?

After adding f:\videos as a recording drive, did you restart SageTV? I don't think it will do a rescan for recordings until you restart.

- Andy

[kltye]

Yep, I shut down the service, moved the files around, started it back up, restarted it, but it still wouldn't "move" the path.

[Opus4]

What about the term 'map' that you used? The service can't use a mapped drive, but I don't know if that is what you meant by "that I now want to map to f:\videos".

- Andy

[kltye]

Oh, by "map" I simply mean "have wiz.bin change the physical path from c:\program files... to f:\videos". Sorry about the confusion.

[Opus4]

What version of SageTV are you using? I didn't notice it mentioned above.

- Andy

[kltye]

5.0.4, with 1.4.2.11 Java.

[Opus4]

Unless the service doesn't have permission to read that new recording dir, I'm just about out of ideas. What was described previously should have worked.

Are the recordings you copied to the new recording dir at least being imported into the video library? You added the new dir as a recording dir, not an import dir, right?

One last thing & then I won't know what else to suggest... create a new dir on drive f. Add it as a recording dir. It should still be empty at this point. Close SageTV. Move the files on drive f to the new dir. Restart SageTV again. Anything change this time? (You can now remove the old/empty recording dir on drive f.)

You could turn on debug logging (in the FAQs) & see what the log might have to say near the beginning of the file regarding the files it expects to see & the ones it finds.

- Andy

[kltye]

>Are the recordings you copied to the new recording dir at least being imported into the video library? You added the new dir as a recording dir, not an import dir, right?

If by video library you mean Media Center --> Imported Videos, then no, it's not being imported there. Yes, I'm adding it as a recording dir.

>One last thing & then I won't know what else to suggest... create a new dir on drive f. Add it as a recording dir. It should still be empty at this point. Close SageTV. Move the files on drive f to the new dir. Restart SageTV again. Anything change this time? (You can now remove the old/empty recording dir on drive f.)

Very interesting results here. A majority of the files did not have their paths updated in wiz.bin, but a couple of them did get updated to the new dir. I'm not sure what's happening here or what the pattern is; I'll have to investigate further.

>You could turn on debug logging (in the FAQs) & see what the log might have to say near the beginning of the file regarding the files it expects to see & the ones it finds.

I've left debug logging turned on for a while now, and I didn't discover anything interesting about what files it expects to see and the ones it actually finds.