[mythtvnz] Saving and restoring video files over a reinstall

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 20:21:31 +1300, you wrote:

>Friends
>
>My MythTV installation is kaput.  It is a mess and I wish to reinstall
>the system.  (I posted some pained emails a day ago(?), the problems
>have tuned intermitent, the system thinks I have about a dozen video
>sources....  A mess)
>
>I would like not to loose the TV I have recorded as I have not watched
>all of it.
>
>Where should I look for instructions?
>
>I have some spare hard drives I would like to stick in the box while I
>am at it, so there must be a way to spread the recorded files over
>several discs...
>
>W

The normal way to fix problems with your video sources is to do a full
delete of all sources and reconfigure them again.  That only affects
those bits of the database, leaving your recordings intact. There is a
special option somewhere in mythtv-setup to do a full delete - I
believe it triggers some special code that was written specifically
for problems like yours where everything is screwed up and you need to
start again, and it puts you back to completely clean database for the
sources and related things.  Personally, I would make sure I did a
database backup before doing that.

If you add more drives and want to balance the free space on all the
drives by moving recordings between them, you can just do that
manually.  MythTV does not care where a recording is stored, it will
find it as long as it is in a directory that has been added to a
storage group.

As I have regularly added drives over time (7 recording drives now), I
wrote myself a script that automates the process.  It works by moving
random files between the directories in the Default storage group
until all the drives are reasonably balanced.  It stops running
automatically if there is a recording starting soon.  It is available
from my web server:

  http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/balance_storage.sh