Is there a way to backup and restore TVHeadEnd's configuration?

K Shea

I have one TVHeadEnd system that is mostly working well and is running under Debian Wheezy. Unfortunately when I tried to add an additional DVB-S2 tuner card, I discovered the only other PCIe card slot on the board is defective (even the original tuner card won't work in that slot, and it turns out this is not an uncommon issue with this model motherboard). So I am going to have to replace the motherboard, and it won't be with the exact same model, though everything else will be the same. Only the motherboard and the additional tuner card will be new.

What is the least enjoyable part of doing something like that is having to re-enter everything from scratch. I know we will have to start with a fresh install of the operating system and reinstall TVHeadEnd, but is there a way to export all or any part of the existing configuration and then import it into the "new" system?

Or if that's not possible, is there at least some way to export the settings for the existing channels (showing frequency, symbol rate, polarity, etc.) to a human-readable format so I don't have to look up the configuration for each channel individually?

alf alfonsius

if you don't compile custom, config should be in /home/<user>/.hts (if run as root in /root/.hts), binary in /usr/bin/tvheadend and the rest in /usr/share/tvheadend/. i just copy that to the new system(always debian) and it works. i do compile git master on vmware cuz my system doesnt work with the ffmpeg includes, and then copy it over

regards
alf

ProfYaffle

... and master creates a backup for you now as well, albeit of your previous configuration since it's created on upgrade. So I've got a handy collection of tar.bz2 files in /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend/backup. I'll declare now that I've never tried restoring from one, though, so I'm only assuming they're complete - you'd also need to be certain to extract directory structure and permissions, and map UID/GID correctly on the new system (I'd expect).