[chotto69]

Hi,
I'm having problems half of the time with the clean library function: sometimes it behaves normally and removes incorrect entries (movies and tv series I have deleted but still showing in the library) but other times it just wipes out completely the library leaving me with nothing.
Luckily, after one of these painful "accidents" I never attempt to clean the library before a backup so I can at least revert back to where I was.

Any idea what could be the cause of this issue? I'm running Eden, by the way.

Thanks in advance

[PatK]

It's possible the user data was compromised or corrupted , in that scenario a rebuild would overwrite your sources. Also possible that sources not attached would clean out your listings. In windows O/S with external drive letters, they can get switched around when you boot with a USB key that is assigned a previous used drive letter. Then when you do a clean up the 'path' is no longer valid and all those movies get cleaned out. Glad you're keeping back-ups, but I find that exporting as separate files is sufficient, and a local re-scrape is pretty quick.

I would suggest that you update, you will be missing out and at this point I'm enjoying Gotham B2

[chotto69]

Thanks for your reply.

The reason why I stick to Eden is that after having tried to update to Frodo several months ago, I was having all sort of problems with user interface errors, scraping, etc so I reverted to Eden (will give Gotham a try once a stable version is out, though).

Regading my issue, I am somehow puzzled as why my sources might seem unattached: all my media is stored on my Synology NAS and XBMC never had a problem with SMB discovery (I had the issue you mention when I initially relied on Window's network drives which often appeared unavailable until 'clicked' on Windows Explorer!).

Corrupted (or compromised) user data might be a possibility but still don't understand why if I perform a clean library twice it may work once but not the next time

If that's the case, do I have other options to remove old tv shows from the library? I found that removing movies it's easy: once I physically removed the subfolder with the movie and it's still showing in the library, I just tray to play it and XBMC will inform me that the movie is not available and ask me if I want to remove it from the library. Sadly the same thing doesn't happen with TV shows that just sit there...

Again thanks for any input

[PatK]

When XBMC knocks on the door, and no one answers in a timely fashion, the system assumes that the door is not there. Depends on your NAS, and if it has to spin up on a knock, if it does XBMC clean doesn't wait long enough, timing is everything, and might account for your hit & miss functionality. I'd probably feel more comfortable if you knocked on the NAS door and accessed all the drives to ensure none are sleeping, prior to a clean.

Updating to the latest XBMC would at least get you to the point that developers might take an interest in your dilemma, there's just been so many bugs stomped out from two major releases some of which may indeed have addressed this very issue.

At this point I suggest you consider a fresh install of the latest and without risking your current install, (assuming windows) just rename the critical folders to 'XBMC_EDEN'. That would be C:\Program Files (x86)\XBMC and C:\Users\YOUR COMPUTER NAME\AppData\Roaming\XBMC install the latest then re-scrape locally and start enjoying the XBMC system again.

[chotto69]

I think you may have an excellent point here, PatK.

I have setup my NAS to put the drives to sleep if unused and it could well be that sometimes when I run the Clean Library feature the drives are sleeping. I know for sure that yesterday night when I last tried this, I had just backed up the library and it took nearly 20 minutes, a time long enough for the NAS to pause the drives. I will try again when I'm sure the NAS is well awake and see if it makes a difference.

Regarding XBMC upgrade, I will definetely try updating it and it goes without saying that I will have an emergency backup with old-good-Eden ready, just in case: I have an image of my OS drive which has been proved quite useful in the past and since the OS drive is an SSD, a restore takes less time than rebuilding a library from within XBMC!

Thanks for your input, PatK: I have now a logical explanation of this intermittent (and annoying) issue

[PatK]

Be somewhat tolerant of your update, there has been quite a few changes and key would be that covers are now called movie_name-poster,jpg, thumbnails are no longer used.

[chotto69]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll have a good read at the release notes anyway.

Also, I think that your diagnosis was correct: I tried again to clean the library making sure the drives were awake and it worked as expected.

Thanks again for your help: I'm marking the thread "solved"