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+---- Thread: Lost .nfo files (/showthread.php?tid=333418)
Lost .nfo files - mhendu - 2018-07-05
I made some batch edits to my .nfo files using Notepad++ (replacing UK with United Kingdom in the country field). My .nfo files were fine, but then I didn't see a way to reload the movie data from the .nfo in TinyMediaManager so I deleted all the movies from the database and rescanned the source. Apparently during the process TinyMediaManager deleted almost all my .nfo files - I have .info files I think in most if not all of the directories instead that must've been put there by TinyMediaManager but these aren't being read when updating the source so most of the movies show as having no info in the program.
Why is TinyMediaManager placing .info files in the directory and removing my .nfo files when I remove a movie from the database? How do I recover my lost data? The .nfo files are not in my Recycling Bin.
RE: Lost .nfo files - thwaller - 2018-07-05
(2018-07-05, 05:48)mhendu Wrote: How do I recover my lost data?From yesterday's backup
Seriously though....The reason for my post is actually to help in the future since I cannot help you recover overwritten data. Aside from stressing the importance of backing up your data, here is what I have done to help keep my data safe as it relates to tMM. I first have it set to write the data to "movie.nfo", so this way I always know what tMM will attempt to write to in all cases. Also, in the Renamer tab, there is a check box for remove all other NFOs. Uncheck that unless that is for sure what you want. I uncheck because I do not want tMM performing read/write operations to external data to itself without my expressed knowledge. Finally, when I store any data I want to keep with my files, I do not use NFO files, as NFO is an extension I know tMM writes to. Although I set it to write to movie.nfo and not to delete other NFO files, settings can change and/or get reset. I use Linux, so for text I commonly use no extension on the file, as most all programs read and write to files with extensions by default.
I hope you can see the steps I use and see the safety redundancy it creates, although it does not help you now. An additional bit is that it is never a good idea to make modifications to files that are software populated, outside of the software itself. So in this case, assuming you write to movie.nfo, it is not so safe to externally modify said movie.nfo files outside of tMM. Specifically, this is because tMM has a function to "rewrite NFO for selected movie(s)", so a simple click could wipe and rewrite all your NFO files. It is for reasons like this it is normally best to leave system generated files to the system, that is what the media manager is for, to manage your media, so it needs access to do so. And something that really applies to all data work, whenever you are doing operations that make a lot of data changes, always backup said data (all data that is writable by the software) before proceeding.
RE: Lost .nfo files - myron - 2018-07-05
TMM does not write .info files - we don't even know this format.
TMM usually does not delete files, unless you told it so. (Delete vs Delete from DB only)
When TMM deltes files, you probably will find it in a hidden folder called .deletedByTMM within your datasource.
Please upload logs to some pastebin site...
RE: Lost .nfo files - mhendu - 2018-07-05
I'm looking at the logs but I don't see anything that indicates why all this stuff happened - when I deleted all the movies from the database there's just a gap in the logs (I know I selected the right option here and the only files missing that I can tell are the .nfo files). Also, the only time the .info files show up is when I scanned the source again to add the movies back and it says 'not adding unknown media file type.' I don't know where the .info files came from but they are apparently the same as my .nfo files in every way - I renamed *.info to *.nfo, deleted my database and rescanned all the files and everything looks normal now, including the updates I made to change the country name. I assumed this behavior was from TMM but it's also possible that it was Ember Media Manager - I had scanned all my files into Ember right before I deleted the files from TMM since I can search by country in Ember and thought this would help me identify if I'd done the edit to the text files correctly. That seemed less likely to me since in Ember I was just loading the files into the DB, whereas with TMM I had removed them from the DB, but that could be the case.
Now that I'm looking into that possibility that actually seems more likely - I see also in Ember that a bunch of movies are missing data, and I did a Google search and ran across this thread:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=174366
Apparently when Ember runs across a .nfo file with 'errors' it renames the file to .info. Not clear why it thinks there are errors in the TMM files if that's the case - these files loaded fine into Kodi.