Add on and skin file locations?

1st Official Post

    Hi Everyone,

    First post!

    I've got 70 iMac's running LibreElec. The iMac's are old (2009) and have the original 500GB HDD installed. They're starting to fail rather often. We usually use Clonezilla to reimage a new drive. We've run out of 500GB drives. I've purchased 32GB SSD drives. Clonezilla has a really hard time cloning to drives with different properties so I've decided to just start fresh.

    Downloaded the LibreELEC install files and BAM so easy. I've got it running. Now I just have to make it look and feel like the other machines onboard.

    There are some proprietary add-ons and a custom skin that were created for us. Do you think it would be possible to copy just those skin and add-on files off the old HDD and paste them in my new install? Does anyone know where skin and add-on files are located and what they look like?

    Thanks a lot!

    • Official Post

    I would be interested to know which organization(?) has 70 iMac's running LibreELEC, as they are not the typical choice of hardware for running Kodi.

    Using CloneZilla is one way, or just installing LibreELEC fresh and restoring a good backup for the storage data is another.

    Additonal skins, when installed, will be placed in the .kodi/addons folder. Subsequent settings will be placed in .kodi/userdata/addon_data/skin.<name>.

    If you have a redesigned Estuary system skin, those files will be placed in the readonly section of the system partition. Settings of Estuary are located in .kodi/userdata/addon_data/skin.estuary .

    All data is stored on the storage partition. There is a backup/restore section in the LibreELEC Settings add-on. You can use that to transfer/copy settings from one computer to the next. I'm not sure if the CloneZilla method is faster, but there is more than one way to get to Rome. :)

    Helpful!

    I'll use your info to have a closer look. I've since downloaded the Backup add-on on a working iMac and on the iMac with the new SSD drive. I followed a youtube video showing how to backup and restore as much as allowed.

    The skin and some other settings made it across but the main Add-on that has all the IPTV stuff didn't install correctly. I'll go through the process again and write down the error this time.

    When you say .kodi/userdata/addon_data/skin.<name> how to get to those files? I don't see them in the folders within Kodi's Gui. When I SSH in all I see in the root folder is backup, music, screenshots, videos, lost+found, pictures, tvshows.

    I'm clearly a novice Linux user.

    I can't tell you much about our organization other than it's a very large yacht.

    Thanks for the info. I'm going to keep poking around to see what I can find.

    Okay. I've found the add-ons folder and see a bunch of stuff that I'd LOVE to migrate to the other machine.

    Is there an installation procedure or can I just copy/paste the contents into the new machine?


    I just tried the fdisk -l command but it looks like maybe LibreELEC is so stripped down that these commands aren't an option. Do you know how I can get the add-on files from one machine to the other?

    Thanks again! Really looking forward to giving it a try. My eyes hurt from reading all day. I'll give it another go tomorrow.

    • Official Post

    Use the backup/restore function in the LE settings add-on to capture files from a complete and working install, not the Kodi repo backup add-on. Our restore process will be faster and more complete than anything else. Clean install LE to the new drive then restore the backup.