[MacGyver]

Hallo MacGyver. How can I quickly exchange theme settings between different instances? In the userdata folder I see a settings.xml, but it doesn't really help me (there I can only customize slide shows for backgrounds). Every now and then I change NAS drives and in metropolis I have smb music sources as menu items and widgets - where I then have to recreate the path every time - and this on all devices. Is there a configuration file that I can customize and distribute? And I remember there was a backup feature a few years ago. Did I somehow uninstall that or was that removed?

If you mean move all your settings from one install to another, you can sort of get that by moving the settings.xml under "userdata\addon_data\skin.metropolis" and after the addons get reinstalled you can sometimes move the contents of the "userdata\addon_data\script.skinshortcuts" folder from the old one to the new one. In addition to the various XMLs in "userdata" itself. Then make no other changes and reboot (even better if you can do the reboot from SSH maybe).

Now I say "sort of" because Kodi will overwrite the old copy you just copied over with any changes the app needs to make. In other words, you just copied over all the XMLs but when exiting Kodi it "saves changes on exit" well that just undid your copying. Sometimes the only way to keep the changes is to just pull the plug right after the copy function finishes, but that can corrupt other things, so not a great idea.

It works most of the time for me, but sometimes menu items I have made from Favorites will just not work and I have to recreate them.

I also move the .db files from one box to another all the time (with sources.xml and the thumbnails folders too of course) rather than re-scrape everything all over again.

Just know that major or even minor version changes in Kodi or the addons can make that method stop working at any time, so be prepared every now and again to do it all from scratch. (and maybe even a complete Kodi install if the new version refuses to work with old settings in its XMLs.)