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+---- Thread: Req Data protection functionality (/showthread.php?tid=333420)
Data protection functionality - thwaller - 2018-07-05
Another user recently reported an issue with lost data, inadvertently overwritten by tMM. There have been some things that bother me a bit, so I thought I would propose them for consideration.
1) The ability to "lock" images / artwork, especially the poster and fanart. When you do a new scrape, those items are often overwritten / replaced with whatever is selected by tMM or the scraper, not sure how it works exactly. But many customize these, or make specific selections and having them overwritten can easily waste a lot of bandwidth and time and file writes for no intended reason. Write actions being more relevant to those with SSD and/or with backups, especially real time backups. Even a replacement of an image with the same image will prompt the backup to see a change.
2) The ability to lock / prevent the "initialize database" menu item. Although not easy to accidentally click, it would be nice for some redundant safety measures to be there to prevent inadvertent use.
3) Automatic file backup. This is 2 parts:
a) Each time tMM starts (maybe given the setting of a variable to turn on and off), tMM automatically creates a backup of the starting database files. This would be sort of how system and programs logs work, where each time you start the system or program, the former log is saved and you start with a fresh and empty log. This would just make a integrated one prior backup at all times.
b) When tMM overwrites a NFO file, like movie.nfo, it creates a movie.nfo.bak before the overwrite.
These are just some items I thought of that I believe most all users would see a benefit in... especially if you could turn them on and off so you are not forced to change anything should you desire not to.
RE: Data protection functionality - myron - 2018-07-05
1) locking can be quite challenging.
In fact, you need for everything an additional checkbox, if to lock or not.
This will make the GUI and settings quite unusable i guess, for a low benefit.
In fact, on scraping you have the checkboxes what to scrape.
If you untick "artwork", we would not scrape, thus not overwriting artworks...
Or do it the other way round - untick artwork in global settings, and only activate selective on scrape...
"Locking" is not what we want to implement...
2) well, we might even remove this.
The method does nothing beside deleting the database, and restarting TMM.
3) we already have DB backups in our /backups/ folder.
So technically you could fire up an old version, and recreate the NFO files (if the movie structure has not changed)
When we delete files, the default is to move them to a .deletedByTMM folder inside your datasource.
Spamming folders with .bak files is not what we want to archieve...
But yes, existing NFO files are not considered here.
We would always write (on changes) with our information in database (which we might have read from NFO file also)
We even keep unknown entries when writing NFO - so no information should get lost
Have no idea what we could do to further improve the data protection.