Backup from the command line

[amarkowi]

Hi Garry

Many of us have aging MC PCs that we've been getting nervous about. Any chance of getting a command line option in the client to kick off a backup. We'd then kick off a scheduled task to copy it to a remote machine.

I've looked at the dates of the backups in the eHome folder, and couldn't figure out what/when caused them to update.

Thanks

[StinkyImp]

I've looked at the dates of the backups in the eHome folder, and couldn't figure out what/when caused them to update.

A few years ago I had the same dilemma. My solution is to use Microsoft Synctoy to backup the contents of the "ehome" folder to a separate drive every night. I also use it to backup various other items to a remote "mapped drive" without a problem.

I set up the folder pairs in Synctoy and then created a scheduled task. I haven't had to think about it since!

[amarkowi]

But the backups in eHome don't update after every EPG123 Client import. What you're backing up - doesn't the content need to be refreshed daily to save the latest information?

[StinkyImp]

It's always been my understanding that WMC uses the contents of the "ehome" folder to populate itself. Therefore it's always the most current version(s) regardless of the file dates.

Maybe someone else can confirm (or clarify) my understanding of this?

[Space]

The backups in the ehome folder are created by WMC itself. The two main backups are the "recordings" and the "lineup" (the "subscriptions" backup is also there, but that is not very important since there are no subscriptions anymore).

Backups of all you Series go in to the "recordings" backup folder and seem to be backed up every time you add or modify your Series, so these backups should always be up to date. However, the "lineup" backup does not seem to be updated whenever your lineup changes, so that backup has to be triggered externally. Usually your lineup doesn't change that often, so not having the most recent backup is not usually a problem unless you've gone a long time without a backup.

EPG123 triggers a backup of both the "recordings", "lineup" and "subscriptions" whenever it does it's garbage cleanup routine, which is once every 5 days.

Note that this backup is not of any data from the guide listings (the bulk of the data that EPG123 loads), just the Series and the lineup information (the lineup is what network is on each channel, what channels you have enabled/disabled, etc.). So doing an backup of the "lineup" after every EPG123 update doesn't make much sense, since the backup will only be different if the EPG123 update caused the lineup to change (such as getting a new channel in you lineup).

Note that in addition to the automatic 5-day backups, you can also trigger a manual backup from the EPG123 GUI. In this case it will not only put the backups in the ehome folder, it will also zip up a copy of the backups and save it in the epg123/backup folder.