Best Practices for copying KODI instance to another device

[Bambu Utila 7]

Hi,

 

I was wondering if there are any guidelines or best practices for cloning your KODI setup while using Emby.

 

what i do so far is just install KODI on the second device and then copy over the USER\AppData\Roaming\Kodi folder.

 

That works well, but it doesn't allow me to create a new device ID before that new KODI instance connects to Emby. So i run into some issues and have to create new Device id's on all to make it work again. Emby server gets understandably confused when 2 or more devices log on with the same device id

 

So i'm just wondering if there is an extra step i can do to avoid this problem? Adjust a file/files before i copy it all over so it prompts for login id or something. Just so i can change the Device name and get a new Device ID generated before connect to Emby for the first time with the new device

 

Thanks in advance to anybody who can give me some advice on this

[Luke 37022]

@@jachin99 do you have any insight?

[feerlessleadr 154]

I used to backup my kodi userdata folder so that in the event something got borked, I could just remove the old userdata folder, rename the backed up folder and be up and running again. 

 

This worked really well for most addons, but really poorly for E4K. It seemed like the number of times I did this something different stopped working with e4k each time. What I ended up doing was since there aren't super customized e4k settings, and since the library needed to be re-set anyway to get syncing to work correctly, I just deleted the e4k folder from the addons folder and addon_data folder in my backed up profile folder, then just re-installed e4k from the beta repo and set up normally. 

 

initial setup was a smidge longer, but over the long term I've had no recurring issues as a result of doing it this way. 

[Bambu Utila 7]

I've done some digging of my own and this is what i came up with.

 

As mentioned above i copy the whole KODI folder from Users\USER\AppData\...

there are some folders i delete though, the Thumbnails folder and the packages folder. (deleting those 2 folders brought my KODI folder down from 1GB to 250MB

 

In the userdata\addon_data\plugin.video.emby folder I delete the emby_guid file. A new one gets generated automatically this way it seems for the new device.

 

In the userdata folder i edit the guisettings.xml file.

there is an entry that represents the name of the KODI instance. I just change it to the name of the device i'm installing this build on.

 

Then when you copy this adjusted KODI folder to the new device you have to do absolutely nothing. Everything starts up as expected and everything just works.

 

I don't think i generate any problems this way. I tried it on an extra pc and my Nvidia Shield and so far it seems to work perfect.

 

But if anybody sees an issue with this, please let me know