So how do I transfer config from one install to another??

1st Official Post

    For 2 days I've been banging my head against the wall, trying to in Libreelec (v8.0.1a on an S805 box) what should be a simple task: transfer my Kodi config files to a new install (I simply want to put my LE install on a faster SD card!). Doing the obvious, saving a backup in LE settings and then restoring the backup on the new SD card is impossible for me. I add the backup to the new SD card's backup directory. But after I restore, my install is corrupted, and after I wait for LE to fix the corruption, the backup is gone and everything is reset to zero. After reformatting and reinstalling LE on the new card, I tried just overwriting the default "addons" and "userdata" directories, with the folders in my old directories. Same result: upon reboot, LE is corrupted and tries to fix itself, then deletes everything I added and returns to stock settings.

    So how I am I doing the transfers? Well, of course I can't simply access the .kodi files straight off the SD card. as neither my Mac nor Windows computers will see those ext4 files. Since I can't get the Mac to properly read&write to the LE SD card no matter what software I try, I installed Paragon's "EFTS" software, which allows you to read & write ext2-3-4 partitions under Windows. Maybe its not writing those files correctly, but I don't know where the problem lies. I'm at a loss to figure out how to move my addons & configs from the old SD card to the new. Surely this is possible with LE??

    • Official Post

    I would boot with the old SD card, make a backup and use sftp (filezilla will work) or samba the backup file to your Mac or Windoze machine. Shut down your S905 machine and boot with the new SD card and then reverse the process to put the backup file in a suitable location, and then restore it.

    If that still fails you can still delete/rename/move files with ftp.

    Alternatively you could use win32diskimager to read your old SD card and then use that image to write to your new SD card (However, on some occasions that will not work if both SD cards are the same size - and definitely won't work if the new SD card is smaller.)

    If the new card is larger you will need to resize it - see thread-6086.html for hints.

    I'm sure there is a SIMPLE file - called something like "resize_on_boot" you can put in something like .config which will resize the file system automatically, but I don't know the exact details. Maybe someone else can comment on this.

    Edited once, last by Iridium (April 13, 2017 at 9:17 PM).

    UPDATE: Thanks for the responses, guys. In short time, I've already solved the problem (finally!). I had a hunch the problem stemmed from Paragon EFTS Linux partition reader-writer for Windows. So what I did was use an LE backup (.tar) fiile that I had on my (Mac) that was copied from the old install, and then copied that over to the box via SSH. So the files don't go through Paragon or Windows. This time the backup worked. However, my Beelink remote no longer works, but I'm putting that in another thread!

    (BTW, I originally tried cloning the old SD card to the newer, larger SD card.... several times. That never worked!).

    Edited once, last by Skinjob (April 13, 2017 at 9:38 PM).