[SOLVED] Lost ratings, images, etc...

[rude]

Hi,
my collection is 43882 songs.
Few days ago I found 17097 files which had lost their ratings, album images, # reproduction/skips, genres, labels...
Thinking it was a gmbrc file corruption problem I restored a backup version of it, but with no positive result.
Am I doing something wrong? What can I do to get back my settings?
Thanks

[Quentin Sculo]

Well it shouldn't happen, at least not on its own.
Did you move or rename these files ? That could explain it, if you move/rename them, then add the files with their new file names, then remove the songs whose file cannot be found.
I've made a change in git a weeks ago that would prevent that problem, with current version, if you move/rename files, you have to remove them first and then add them, to keep the metadata not saved in the tags. With the current git version, you can just add the files and it should just update their filename/path.

If you haven't moved or renamed them, I don't know what happened. If you have kept a backup of the gmbrc file before that happened, I could take a look if you want, and probably restore your settings. Just send me the backup and the current gmbrc file by email (compress them and/or send me a link to them)
(sorry for not replying sooner)

[rude]

Quentin, thanks for your answer.
No, I didn't move or rename any of my files.
I noticed (more or less 2/3 months ago) that some files were losing their album image (each album has an image, each file has an album) with no apparent reason. Reassigning them was a matter of seconds, but after a while the image disappeared again.
One day my system was heavily slowed down: after half an hour waiting gmb could end up with its checks, I closed the little progress window and I realized what happened.
Thinking it was a database corruption, I tried to restore an old gmbrc file, but with no evident success.
At the moment, also files with correct ratings, etc., have lost their image, but many of them show an unwanted one (every file > the same image).
I sent you my last 3 backupped gmbrc files: note their size is decreasing, but I didn't erase or clean anything.
Thanks

[Quentin Sculo]

Sorry for taking so long to reply. I've looked at the files you sent me. I don't see anything suspicious between the first 2 (though it's hard to tell, it seems lots of files from Extra were removed), but between the last 2, it seems the save was truncated after song 26784, and as album and artist pictures are saved after the songs data, they were all lost. After that, when you launched gmb, it seems you have activated the scan-at-launch-option, so all songs that were after 26784 were added back, but of course without ratings, labels and stats.

I don't know what could have caused this, if there are any error during the save, it should just rename the temporary save file to gmbrc.error instead of replacing the old gmbrc, I've tested that with an out of space error, and it worked. Are you using a special filesystem ?

You said you've tried to restore an old gmbrc without success, what happened exactly ? If you can reproduce it, it could be very useful to try to determine what caused this.

If you want me to try to restore some of the lost data, send me the most recent gmbrc, I can do a quick mix (keep options and data from songs pre-26784 from most recent gmbrc and keep data from songs post-26784 and artist/album pictures from the last good gmbrc)

[rude]

Hi, I'm back!  :) :) :)
First of all: YES! Please try to restore my data! The three gmbrc files I sent you are the most recent and they should contain (don't know in what manner) all the data I need. Thanks in advance for that!!

Then:
My attempts to restore gmbrc were simply the substitution of the 'corrupted' with the backupped ones that I keep in other disks (exactly what I sent you).

Neither I know the cause or what happened. I just remember of a strange and unusual very-long session of file-verifying (?) that I stopped after a long time because apparently with no end... Don't care of Extra: it's a partition of passage where I spend the files not yet stored in gmb.
No special filesystem: just an ordinary EXT4 under Linux Mint. This is the first time I have such a big problem with my music collection.

Hope in your help... Thank you again!

[rude]

I received a BRAND NEW (2 gmbrc's mixed together) gmbrc file from Quentin that seems to be containing all my (precious) data.
Let's hope this problem doesn't happen again in the future.
Thanks sincerely to Quentin!  :) :) :)