Thought I'd share the experiences and terrors of my past week+ recovering from a complete and catastrophic failure of my server and backup external HDD within days of each other! Let my exhaustion and frustration be beautiful learning lessons for you, or at least schadenfreude if that is your thing.
The Wonderful and Easy
Installing a new Channel DVR on another machine and restoring from backup is as easy as could be. I had done some test runs in the past just to see, and was glad it worked just as well for real. I already cloud-sync'd my Imports directory, so every Stream Link was saved. I was able to get my old server to boot up (took 2 days) long enough to get the Database, Images, and Streaming directories off of there, which I now also cloud-sync after learning I should have been doing that the hard way. In case you are wondering how to do this, you can create a "Symbolic Link" where one directory is actually in two places. I do this with the above mentioned Channels directory to a folder on my Onedrive so I can interact with it on there on any of my other computers. Here are directions for Windows:
I don't have enough free cloud storage to do this with the Logs directory, so that I'm just going to be backing up to an external SSD. While my server was up, I did manually move that over, as well as do all of the other functions of migration like turning off Bonjour on the old server.
The Fairly Painless
While my External HDD I used for backups and overflows decided to die as well just a few days later, I had a second smaller External SSD with much of my non-Channels related backups on it (Fitness programs, music, photos, etc...). I was able to replicate the directory structure on that for what I used with Channels. For anything that was personal media, most of the time I could re-download it and place it in the same location (made the drive the same letter as the old one). At the worst Channels thought it was new and I just had to run a prune to delete the old version.
For Channels recordings, if I was able to... acquire... another copy of the file, all I had to do was get the file name from Options > View Details:
Then I named my replacement file the exact same thing, put it in the appropriate Channels recording directory, and refreshed the metadata, which you can do en masse per season. Afterwards, it was fine:
This worked even if my new file was a different extension (I just gave it the expected extension). All the files play with no issue. There is a problem of alignment with detected commercials and things like that, but that is a minor inconvenience and can just be ignored.
Also, some recordings could just be replaced with Stream Links, so I just deleted the original recordings and went with those where it made sense.
I have a new larger SSD coming in the mail and I'll be moving all of my backups and overflows on to that and maintaining that second backup as a NAS for harder to find things, my personal stuff, and non-Channels related files.
The Annoying but Oh Well
Some shows had not been watched yet and I could not find replacements for them. For some of those, the easiest thing to do was to modify the pass and chose to re-record deleted episodes (in some cases, changing Advanced Options to only record after a particular season if the show had been started). I deleted the episodes through Settings > DVR Database > Manage Recordings Database > Missing/Deleted. It is VERY IMPORTANT to note that this just moves the records to the Trash, it does not mark them as not deleted.
Also, there is no picking and choosing (its all or nothing), so I had to restore individual items I was not quite done with yet.
I do have to remember that once everything is recorded again that I will have to go back in and change the options to not re-recorded deleted episodes, otherwise we'll be in a loop forever.
If something were more individual of a recording and it was in the guide, it was very, very easy to mark as not recorded and then select to record again. However, it was per episode/movie and was dependent upon the guide. When I could do it, it was the best. Most of the time, this feature did nothing for me.
Finally, some recordings/files I had were rare and/or I wanted to save them forever. Others, I have been carrying for decades and still haven't watched. This gave me a chance to confront my own digital hoarding and let some things go.
The Downright Horrible
As hinted at above, not everything was going to work out this way. So that brings us to the CURL -XDELETE method of marking things as not recorded (special thanks to @chDVRuser for the many, many helpful posts during my recovery process):
This is plain awful. Having to find an individual program ID and delete it one-by-one from the recording database was by the far the hardest and most painful thing to do, especially in the volumes I was dealing with. I cannot emphasize enough how much this feature is needed in the front end:
And as it is, I have things that this still may not work for. For instance, I have some movies I recorded that are not airing any time soon and are hard to come by (like 1930s stuff). If I could just say re-record this and be done, it would be fine. I am attempting an Advanced Pass but I have no way right now to confirm it is working.
Instead, I will have to keep an eye out to see if some of these movies are airing, and if so that my pass will work.
Further, really advanced things like what is available under /dvr and what type of curl or other commands work are just scattered over so many different threads on here that it is insanely difficult to find out if a function is already possible. I know this is not something the Devs would want in the general help, but somewhere else where it could be documented and organized would be wonderful. I'm not as super advanced as some of the users on here, but enough that I can follow what they say. Maybe a wiki would be a place for something like this?
The Still to Come
My new server is on my much more powerful daily driver. I have certainly noticed performance improvements in a lot of ways, especially in Comm Skip detection. I suppose I'm also happy to have one less always-on PC around here. This has inspired me to get another PC that I am basically using as a screen for a TV off of the network and combine its functions into my daily driver, as well. So less electricity use and fewer running things will be nice.
Unfortunately, my office is nowhere near where my router needs to be, and even WiFi 6 on the 5ghz spectrum has too much jitter and latency for things the size of OTA recordings (though live hasn't been that much of a problem). My MOCA adapters are in the mail, too, so hopefully that will resolve all of these issues. In the meantime, I've changed my preference orders to use Local TVE over OTA to limit the moving pieces and reduce sizes, so that is also something else I'll have to flip back.
And as mentioned above, I still have to deal with the joy of moving 800gb of data from one SSD to another and remapping their drive letters so as far as Channels (and Plex) are concerned everything is where it was before and nothing changed.
So that's it! Some lessons, some stories, some suggestions, and some finality to come...
