I did some searching, but it appears that if the DB gets corrupted, any orphaned recordings will loose all of the show information from the Program Guide.

Yes, I suffered a DB snafu, and it stopped DL'ing the program guide from SchedulesDirect, (it even lost my ID/PWD to download the guide) and lost about three months of show info. I have no idea on how it happened, but it did. The system still has all the mpg files, but they're not in the listings anymore.

There's NO where/how/way to get that data back?

I ran the myth.rebuild script on a few of the files, but it just adds the channel_date info. Messy. Really Messy.

Heed the warning! Backup OFTEN!

Hmmmmm Can someone export the program info for all of the Criminal Minds, CSI: Miami, and Shark episodes since August and send them to me?

Yes, if you lose your DB and don't have a recent backup, you lose the info on your recorded programs because that's where it's stored. Just like if you have a catastrophic disk failure you lose the information on that disk (for example all your recordings). This is why computer pros are big on backups and it's even built into the KM FE GUI menus.

The situation is messy because the reality is messy. If Cecil made it a KM system requirement to have a separate external backup device, with the capacity to hold copies of all of your media and all the configuration data saved by the backup command, you can bet that >90% of the users would immediately be looking for a way to fake it.

I understand. It's just that something really went south.

I lost my guide login (SD).
The file links in the /myth/pretty directory were gone. (These shouldn't disappear on a DB crash, or do they?)
All the episode references in the database were lost.

It honestly looks like the system reverted to a PRE-SchedulesDirect config, but the tuner/guide links were still there. Very, very odd.

But....

All the MPG files are still there. I'm VERY happy about that, but now I have to re-glue everything back together.

IF I ever get the time...I may look into hacking the myth code so that it will store the program info into a separate file along side of the MPG file. Something like:

channel_datestarttime.INFO

It's just a dream in my mind right now, but maybe someone else may be able to run with it before I can.

I was a heavy dBASE III programmer in a past life!

Doing a regular backup already saves the recording information in the /myth/backup directory which is on the same partition as the recordings. I've also posted directions around here on how to extract selected portions of the backup for various purposes (e.g. - partial restores) but what you really need is to do the backups regularly. They're the easiest and most reliable way to recover your DB.

Also since it sounds like what happened is that you (or someone else) accidentally restored from a really _old_ backup, keeping a current one will reduce the risk from that kind of problem in the future.

tjc,

You're probably VERY correct. What may have caused my problem was a restore of some very OLD backup data that I created before the R5F27 upgrade! That crossed my mind after the second reply. Mmmm. My house guest may have just done that, by accident, of course!

I may have to go though the logs to see if/when it happened.

It would probably be wise to use cron to fire off a backup on a weekly basis.