Server migration questions - temporary server

[pfile]

my venerable mac mini seems to have died, which is OK i think because it was from 2012 and channels server was about to be unsupported on the OS running there.

i set up a temporary channels server on a proxmox system, but since i have almost 20TB of recordings i don't think i want to move all that data (HFS+ disks not super reliable on linux in my experience so i'd have to copy all the data, which will take days).

i think i will just get a new mac mini, install channels, and attach the old disks there, so hopefully there's no real migration to do. but it will take a few days to get it all together, and in the meantime some recordings will pile up on the temporary system.

what i'm wondering is if there's a way to bring in all of my "temporary" recordings from the proxmox server to the new mac mini. i understand you can migrate a whole server, but this would be more of a merge.

per Channels Support - Import Your Own Movies and TV Shows, i also understand you can put TV shows into your 'personal' library but i've never used that feature. are recordings added that way presented in the appleTV UI together with recorded shows? or do they appear somewhere else in the user interface? my hope is that if i select a show in the appleTV UI with 100 recordings, that the 1 or 2 imported from the proxmox server will also appear there under the season together with the natively recorded files.

thanks for the advice,

rob

[tmm1]

Imports appear together.

There is no merge functionality. You could restore your existing DB onto the temp server (without copying recordings), so you are appending to the db only and can move it later.

I think HFS read-only works fine too, so you could make your existing storage "secondary" and send new recordings to a different place.

[pfile]

ok thanks - just to confirm, by "imports appear together" you mean that they look as though they were recorded off the air when using the appleTV client, at least when browsing a show?

@tmm1

There is no merge functionality. You could restore your existing DB onto the temp server (without copying recordings), so you are appending to the db only and can move it later.

when restoring the old DB onto the temporary server, it will destroy/forget any recordings already made, right? because i already have a handful on the temporary server. so it might be too late to do that.

@tmm1

I think HFS read-only works fine too, so you could make your existing storage "secondary" and send new recordings to a different place.

yeah, that's an option. i'm just thinking that the complexity is pretty high with proxmox and if something goes wrong down the line it might be harder to recover from (vs. for instance migrating to a new mac in this current situation, which i think is pretty straightforward.) there are a lot of moving parts with proxmox that i'm only newly familiar with. there's also some modicum of hope that someone else in the household could understand the setup with a dedicated mac, but with the proxmox server there's no way anyone else could ever figure it out. also although this little AMD mini-nas thingy i bought is really neat, the fan is super loud even after replacing it with a noctua fan. so turns out not to be super awesome for the TV room.