How to restore server that resets to wizard after power loss?

[dance4ever 11]

Hi!  I had a cable guy come over and he unplugged my mac mini server (10.15.6) without even asking me

I rebooted and started Emby again and it comes up with the first-time configuration wizard.

$HOME/emby-server still exists and as far as I know, I haven't lost any files.

How do I get my Emby server to reattach to my last configuration?

I actually have 2 instances of Emby running on 2 different ports (8096, 8097) and interestingly enough, the other server came up just fine.

Please let me know if there are any files you need me to check as I have quite a bit of meta-data in my old config!

[Luke 39624]

Hi, I would try just stepping through the wizard and then see if everything comes right up after that.

[dance4ever 11]

ok.  i'll zip the emby-server directory just in case.

[Luke 39624]

Let us know how you get on. Thanks.

[dance4ever 11]

aha - I see what's going on after looking through the log of the new instance.

Since my last reboot a few weeks ago, I since installed gh through homebrew and it creates a ~/.config directory if it doesn't exist to store saved credentials.   I shut down the server and did the following:

cd ~/.config
mv emby-server emby-server.new
mv ~/emby-server .

and restarting worked like a charm.

given ~/emby-server is the default, you may wish to put some logic if Emby notices a new ~/.config, perhaps to ask the user if they wish to move their emby root directory into ~/.config

This would explain why launchctl didn't boot this instance on startup - it was waiting to be configured.

Ok - I'll leave it to your team to figure out how to handle these situations - I'm sure it doesn't happen often - though it did make my heart drop!  Probably don't want this to happen too often

 

[bigferther 1]

This happened to me today! Although, as far as I know, I did not experience power loss (or Macos update, or anything else out of the ordinary for that matter). Restarted my iMac this morning and emby server starts on boot as expected, then prompted me to create my first user. Definitely not expected.  I went through the wizard, but it did not restore my existing library as I had hoped. I had nearly given up and started recreating my library from scratch, but the above terminal commands got me right back up and running!! Thanks so much for this post!

Edited May 19, 2021 by bigferther

[Luke 39624]

19 hours ago, bigferther said:

This happened to me today! Although, as far as I know, I did not experience power loss (or Macos update, or anything else out of the ordinary for that matter). Restarted my iMac this morning and emby server starts on boot as expected, then prompted me to create my first user. Definitely not expected.  I went through the wizard, but it did not restore my existing library as I had hoped. I had nearly given up and started recreating my library from scratch, but the above terminal commands got me right back up and running!! Thanks so much for this post!

Thanks for the feedback !

[bigferther 1]

No problem.  Just for reference: I think the issue for me could be related to some software I installed that day which created a new folder in the .config directory. 

[bjhille 3]

This worked for me!  Not sure what I installed that would have caused this, but running these commands brought my configuration back.  Thank you!!

[Luke 39624]

9 hours ago, bjhille said:

This worked for me!  Not sure what I installed that would have caused this, but running these commands brought my configuration back.  Thank you!!

Thanks for the feedback !