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Author Topic: Windows Vista, dead hard drive, can I save JR settings etc?  (Read 1029 times)

robgil

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My lap tops hard drive has died I think, presently it is in an enclosure connected to a friends lap top and I am transferring all my files etc.
I plan to try and re-install Vista to see if it was just corrupt files causing the none booting issues then transfer all my files back again.
If this works is there any way to save all my settings and tags from JRiver?
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glynor

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Re: Windows Vista, dead hard drive, can I save JR settings etc?
« Reply #1 on: July 26, 2014, 06:14:22 pm »

MC makes backups of the Library automatically.  You can set where these are saved in Tools > Options > File Locations, but it defaults to the logged in user's:
Documents\JRiver\Media Center 19\Library Backups\

In the future, it is best to set this to save to a different disk as where the Library itself resides, whenever possible.  Too late for that now, but...

If you can get your My Documents folder back, you should have ZIP files in there with backups of all MC Settings and your Library.  It saves new ones roughly every two days.

The Library itself could also be intact, of course.  But getting one of the recent backups back would be better, because it includes settings from the Registry.

Refer to the Wiki page on the Library and Library Manager for details on using backups:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library_Manager
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robgil

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Re: Windows Vista, dead hard drive, can I save JR settings etc?
« Reply #2 on: July 26, 2014, 06:18:32 pm »

Thankyou, I found the back up files and managed to save them. All my music and videos were stored on an external hard drive so they are safe.
Thanks again, that saved me a huge amount of work if I had to re-tag everything again.
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glynor

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Re: Windows Vista, dead hard drive, can I save JR settings etc?
« Reply #3 on: July 26, 2014, 08:30:35 pm »

Great.

A tip.  When you set it back up, move the default backup location to the same disk that holds your media files.  That way, you consolidate all of the stuff regarding that Library off of the C drive (so that if it fails, you don't lose both).  Don't move the Library itself, though, as you want that on the fastest possible disk (and your media disk is probably slow).

And then, make sure THAT drive is backed up.  Hopefully that's already true, but if not and you don't have a simple way to do it, I'd recommend CrashPlan for simplicity (assuming it isn't a NAS volume).

Since the volume is probably big, you can "seed" your CrashPlan account by sending them a hard drive.

An alternative is BackBlaze, but they don't offer this pre-seeding service (or didn't last I looked), so if you have many GB (or even TB) of data to send in, the time to get the initial backup done could be, effectively, eternity.

Or, come up with a robust backup system yourself.  But honestly, for most users, those two online services are so cheap and simple to use, that it is safer (even if they occasionally bork up) to use them than to trust any scheme you've concocted yourself, assuming you aren't OCD.
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