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[tzr916]

Please give the end user the ability to setup the Library Auto Backups on a regular schedule, like every X hours + keep X number of backups. This would be a nice feature, especially for your customers using MC for daily Tv Recording 


LONG Story:
I have media spread across 6 SATA drives on my Server PC. Needed to do some maintenance on a possible bad M.2 disk, this required me to install a PCIe card with the M.2 disk attached. I performed the maintenance, pulled it back out. Some time during that work, the drive letters changed in Windows and it appears that MC did it's Auto Import thing in the background. Well it didn't take long for me to realize that a whole bunch of library tags and cover art got screwed up. After ensuring the drive letters were back to original, I did a MC Library Restore but... the most recent backup that didn't have the "bad" tags/cover art was 5 days old  I got back everything except ALL Tv recording that occurred in those 5 days had absolutely no valid tags/guide info. I had to manually fill in Series, Channel, Episode, etc for about 15 recorded shows. Major pain.


SOLUTION (since MC Library backups don't happen often enough for me):
I am now backing up the MC Library every 12 hours using Windows Task Scheduler, auto deleting those older than 15 days, then using a third party program to back up the "C:\Users\Me\Documents\JRiver\Media Center 23\Library Backups" and "C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 23\Cover Art" folders to a non-OS disk every 24hrs (keeping 6 most recent copies). Overkill  Damn right!

[Vocalpoint]

+1. This should have been in the app from the very start.

VP

[Awesome Donkey]

Personally, I just do manually library backups every day and/or every time I make changes to my library.

[tzr916]

If MC is being used as a TV DVR, the Library is changed every time a recording is done and every time new guide data is imported. I've setup task scheduler to back up once at 4pm - after tonight's "to be recorded" is finalized, and once at 4am - after all the shows have finished recording and the new guide data is imported.

[glynor]

You can do this now. This command will initiate a standard, silent Library Backup:
mc23.exe /mcc 20011,1

That uses the regular backup rotation, though if you want to alter it, you could easily script copying the files elsewhere.

[tzr916]

That's exactly what I am doing using windows task scheduler every 12 hours. But why not build it into MC ? Right now the automatic backups are done way too infrequently.

[Vocalpoint]

That's exactly what I am doing using windows task scheduler every 12 hours. But why not build it into MC ? Right now the automatic backups are done way too infrequently.

If you have this working in Task Scheduler - why not just up it to run every hour if you feel the backups are too infrequent?

VP

[tzr916]

Ha, that's waaay too frequent for my tastes. I am saying that the backups that MC does in the background are too infrequent and unpredictable - there seems to be no rhyme or reason to them, let alone any regulated schedule.

[RD James]

I don't know if customization is required, but the random 2-3 day schedule is too infrequent. Most of the time I've had to restore a backup, it's been days old.

[Vocalpoint]

I don't know if customization is required, but the random 2-3 day schedule is too infrequent. Most of the time I've had to restore a backup, it's been days old.

I totally agree. Same deal with Auto import. There is no logic to it whatsoever. Can never tell when it ran, is going to run or if it's running (or not).

Both of these processes need some TLC. They could even be a part of the same scheduling dialog hint...hint..

VP

[Hendrik]

Auto-Import is not scheduled, it listens to filesystem events and runs on demand when something changes.
Backups are currently created every 2 days I believe, at least thats what my backup folder looks like (unless you restart MC all the time, that can throw off the schedule)

[mattkhan]

Can never tell when it ran, is going to run or if it's running (or not).

IMV It would be helpful if the existing reporter functionality (which says some of what is going on right now) were replaced/augmented by a user facing log file that just listed the events as they happen and surfaced this in the UI. The existing log is not this as that is a debug log from a user point of view.

[Vocalpoint]

Auto-Import is not scheduled, it listens to filesystem events and runs on demand when something changes.

That may be - but the shortcoming here is the "something changes" part.

I have witnessed countless scenarios where I copy 5 albums to my music share and watch my server copy of MC take anywhere from 2 minutes to 20 minutes to actually pick up these changes.

It would be a lot more useful if I had a option to tell MC that I want Auto Import run everytime something changes instead of taking it's sweet time to do it. I usually have to resort to running Auto Import manually to get the library current.

And of course - this is the same story with backups. 2 days is useless for an active installation with a lot of changes. Again - I resort to doing it manually to make sure I am backed up.

Both of these processes can be improved upon.

VP