angra
09-05-2002, 02:46 PM
All,
as some know, I've been working on some tools to allow backups of tivo state without having to resort to an full mfsbackup. So far I've succesfully been able to handle season passes and wishlists (trivially easy), and in most cases, logo assignments.
Where I'm hitting a (soft) wall is in thumbs/suggestions. I'm able to backup and restore the entire /Preference section of the MFS structure, and also reassign thumbsdata to all series explicitly referenced by any object therein (as well as reconstrcuting any missing series/episodes).
Thing is, this doesn't work. Or, it's not the whole picture. After going through this process, all series I can find have the proper # of thumbs (what I gave them by hand), and everything in the /Preference database looks right, but the suggestions that the tivo comes up with do _not_ match (even remotely) what the suggestions were before the backup/restore.
I should digress a bit and describe my test setup. I have a working system, and a backup (40GB) hard drive. I did a backup of my live system (using my tools), switched drives (to use the 40bg backup drive), sent the backup file to the tivo, did a "clear and delete everything" which took an hour or so, then ran my restore tool, verified that all season passes/wishlists were in place, verified explicit thumbs, verified all the data in /Preference, and then waited for the tivo to start makign suggestions. After a few hours (with no suggestions showing up), I started fully inverting the thumbs of a few shows, and then restoring to their previous state, thinking that maybe manually thumbing would get the suggestions engine running. I then gave up and went to sleep. When I checked the tivo in the morning, the suggestions were, more or less random.
So, clearly, theres something I'm missing. Anyone have any thoughts on where I should explore next? I'm considering (ugh) manually stepping through the /Server directory and saving any "vector" information I find there. This will make a huge file, but it might be what's needed.
Anyway, since each test requires a fairly long amount of time to process (overnight, it seems), I'd very much appreciate any suggestions or thoughts anyone might have. (also, any pointers on how to get the tivo to speed up its suggestions engine would be very very helpful).
On the upside, if this ever succeeds we will have a tool which should make hacking and experimentation a bit safer.
as some know, I've been working on some tools to allow backups of tivo state without having to resort to an full mfsbackup. So far I've succesfully been able to handle season passes and wishlists (trivially easy), and in most cases, logo assignments.
Where I'm hitting a (soft) wall is in thumbs/suggestions. I'm able to backup and restore the entire /Preference section of the MFS structure, and also reassign thumbsdata to all series explicitly referenced by any object therein (as well as reconstrcuting any missing series/episodes).
Thing is, this doesn't work. Or, it's not the whole picture. After going through this process, all series I can find have the proper # of thumbs (what I gave them by hand), and everything in the /Preference database looks right, but the suggestions that the tivo comes up with do _not_ match (even remotely) what the suggestions were before the backup/restore.
I should digress a bit and describe my test setup. I have a working system, and a backup (40GB) hard drive. I did a backup of my live system (using my tools), switched drives (to use the 40bg backup drive), sent the backup file to the tivo, did a "clear and delete everything" which took an hour or so, then ran my restore tool, verified that all season passes/wishlists were in place, verified explicit thumbs, verified all the data in /Preference, and then waited for the tivo to start makign suggestions. After a few hours (with no suggestions showing up), I started fully inverting the thumbs of a few shows, and then restoring to their previous state, thinking that maybe manually thumbing would get the suggestions engine running. I then gave up and went to sleep. When I checked the tivo in the morning, the suggestions were, more or less random.
So, clearly, theres something I'm missing. Anyone have any thoughts on where I should explore next? I'm considering (ugh) manually stepping through the /Server directory and saving any "vector" information I find there. This will make a huge file, but it might be what's needed.
Anyway, since each test requires a fairly long amount of time to process (overnight, it seems), I'd very much appreciate any suggestions or thoughts anyone might have. (also, any pointers on how to get the tivo to speed up its suggestions engine would be very very helpful).
On the upside, if this ever succeeds we will have a tool which should make hacking and experimentation a bit safer.