Ok, I just spent the greater part of 2 days getting my empeg back to normal. Somehow, during a sync, my playlist got corrupted and left my entire playlist in a flat format. I had to drag and drop all of my 7500 or so mp3 files into their proper folders on my empeg.

There's GOTTA be a way to back-up my playlist when it's in the state I want it in so that if this happens again, I don't go through the same kind of pain.

It would be great if the empeg kept backups on maybe a 2 week sliding scale or something. That way, if things went terribly wrong, you could at least get back to a known working playlist...

Any thoughts?

- Jon

I hate to tell you this after the fact but I *think* you could have saved yourself the trouble.

I had my databases and stuff somehow corrupted and all you need to do to get them back is delete the files /empeg/var/playlists, /empeg/var/tags, and /empeg/var/database and then re-sync. All those files will be rebuilt and it should have gotten you back your original playlists.

Always good to do a search here (or ask around) before banging one's head against the wall.

He did that, apparently they were corrupted beyond recovery. I too would appreciate a way to backup the playlists aside from copying off all the *1 files from the fids directory.

But I guess one way is better than none.

FYI, Playlists are both *0 and *1 files. Though I am not sure what the *0 files are, since they usually contain less then 150 bytes of random looking binary data.

Yeah, as Tim said - I tried that and it didn't work.

I don't mind manually backing up the data so that you could save yourself in case of corruption... Question is, what files do I backup, and is there a real way of re-installing the files if you need to?

Surprised Tony hasn't piped in for this... Tony?

- Jon

*0 playlist files are simply list of member FIDs (4 bytes per child). So, in order to back the playlists up, one has to copy (e.g. using HiJack kernel's ftp daemon) all *0 and *1 files belonging to them. Playlist *0 files can be recognised by them being very short, and *1 by containing the string 'type=playlist'. Obviously, some scripting is going to be needed (e.g. dump the output of ftp 'dir /drive0/fids' to a file and massage it into ftp response file, recognising playlist by length of *0 files; alternatively, download all *1 files and start from there).