Library gone following restart

[HomerRamone]

I recently had a need to reinstall windows. I backed mezzmo up before I did.
Restarted this on the new computer and it was more or less working.
However, recently mezzmo decided to "lose" all the images for my media. So when viewing videos in any mezzmo client instead of the image I saw a white box thing with a large * on it.
When I looked at the possible reason for this it seems it may be down to the location of the mezzmo DB being different. It was on the G drive in my old install and on the C drive in the new.
So, I asked mezzmo to move the DB to my G drive. It did this.
Sadly this did not seem to resolve the issue.
However, things have now taken a turn for the worse. I restarted the computer today and now the library is totally empty.
The database location according to the options page is correctly pointing at G:\MezzmoDatabase and the folder is present and correct.

Needless to say this is somewhat of a problem !

[Peter]

When you restore a backup of your db Mezzmo needs the location to be the same for the artwork to be found as the path to each file is stored in the database. When you move your database the current location of the database is replaced in paths in the database with the new path. This will not update the path to the images if the old path is not the same as the path before the backup. The Mezzmo database is sqlite so you could use an sqlite editor to update the path to the image files if you have some knowledge of sqlite. Or if you send your database to support [at] conceiva [dot] com and let us know the original path and the new path we can update this for you and send it back.

[HomerRamone]

The bigger issue here was the complete lack of a library. The library tab was totally empty. Didnt even say Library in there.
I finally resolved this last night by uninstalling and reinstalling - but this of course means I had to restore an old database (again).
I still seem to be missing images from many files - and even if I try to force it to update these by right clicking a given folder and choosing "update all" (but with only Update Artwork checked - I dont want it to update the metadata - thats fine) it doesnt seem to update the images.

[HomerRamone]

Think I figured this out. Files that didnt seem to update were tagged as locked.
Perhaps in a future update we could have a log message saying "Skipped <X> files with locked metadata" ?

[HomerRamone]

Further to this and following a windows restart the library pane is once again blank. This is becoming rather tiresome now.
1266

[Peter]

This indicates that the database may have been damaged during the restart and the playlist table is missing the library playlist. Was it a normal restart?

[HomerRamone]

It was a restart because windows wanted to do updates.
The library seems to still exist - its streaming files. But the library pane is empty as per the image. Doesn't even have an empty library showing.
This of course makes it impossible to do anything with the library.
Also when this happened the first time I did try restoring a backup. Made no difference at all. Pane was still empty
I could reinstall - but this has happened twice now following a restart. Reinstalling every time ive restarted windows isnt practical :)

[Peter]

Another possibility is the permissions on the database are preventing Mezzmo application from opening the database. Can you please try running Mezzmo.exe as administrator to see if it loads the database correctly?

[HomerRamone]

Backed up the database again
Told Mezzmo to reset the database and still the library wasnt visible.
Uninstalled and reinstalled again then restored the backup I had just made and its all back.

i did recently install norton 360 - which ive not also uninstalled. Maybe theres a conflict going on there ?

[Peter]

It could be an issue with norton 360 if it is doing something with the temporary database files for Mezzmo. Can you please try setting norton 360 to ignore the Mezzmo database folder?

[HomerRamone]

Will give that a shot.
Thanks

[odin]

I had some db corruption before where some playlist items would be blank (matching rules was not working), and to completely reset the db with 1000's of items would take too long to start over since I like to do manual updates.

it's a shame Mezzmo doesn't have a repair feature for the db maybe that would be something to add in the future, it seems like the log can detect errors just needs a way to fix the field or restore from previous backup...etc.

anyways I have had good luck doing this, you can try this but first make a backup for the database, shut down mezzmo server and close out mezzmo, if you have a linux machine handy copy the Mezzmo.db over to the linux pc and run this command.

sqlite3 Mezzmo.db ".dump" | sqlite3 MezzmoNew.db

Then copy MezzmoNew.db over to your windows computer mezzmo database folder and rename it to Mezzmo.db, this should of fixed any corruption , reopen mezzmo, and see how it looks.

there might be a windows port of sqlite3 (probably is) but since I have linux handy I never attempted to try anything else...

[Peter]

We considered adding a database repair feature but a repair can be hit or miss and there is no way to easily verify that all the data is complete after a repair.

[odin]

We considered adding a database repair feature but a repair can be hit or miss and there is no way to easily verify that all the data is complete after a repair.

True but that's the risk with any repair, I used Microsoft chkdsk before and it wiped out half my files trying to recover off a bad hdd :), just add a few warnings tell users not to use it on in extreme cases, suggest restoring backup first...etc

Another useful feature might be an automated db backup setting (like crontab for db) with different levels of backup, ie do Full Backup (images , database..etc), Light Backup (just sql databases) - then with time settings for when to trigger it, with extra options like create full backup every month, and create a light backup every week ...etc

[jbinkley60]

Might be something which could be added via the command line interface (http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?id=mezzmo_command_line_interface) and then users could use the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule. Though backups are disruptive and stop streaming so I am not sure how many folks would want to schedule.

Jeff

[Peter]

You could possibly use the Windows task scheduler and a batch file to copy the Mezzmo.db file to a backup folder periodically. The batch file could contain:

mkdir g:\mymezzmobackups
COPY g:\mymezzmodb\Mezzmo.db g:\mymezzmobackups\Mezzmo_%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%%t ime:~6,2%_%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%%date:~-4,4%.db

You could also add in a 'net stop Mezzmo' before the backup and 'net start Mezzmo' after the backup to stop the server and restart it afterward. This would only apply if the server is running as a service

net stop Mezzmo
mkdir g:\mymezzmobackups
COPY g:\mymezzmodb\Mezzmo.db g:\mymezzmobackups\Mezzmo_%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%%t ime:~6,2%_%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%%date:~-4,4%.db
net start Mezzmo