Watched status lost on manual backup/restore 3.3.1.0

[Samkook 12]

I'm trying to restore a manual backup I made from my 3.3.1.0 server install on debian 9 in a virtualbox debian 9 install and it's failing to restore the watched status every time except 1 time where I actually managed to do it but I can't reproduce it now and I'm failing to see where the issue is.

My media server broke and I couldn't afford to fix it for 2 years and once I did, updating emby became an issue and long story short, the computer hosting the emby server(different than the one hosting my media) doesn't work properly after a failed upgrade to current debian so the emby install there is broken and I can't export my watched status using the trakt plugin to transfer it to a current emby server version. I figured it would be simpler to restore a backup I made when my media server first broke in a VM, transfer the watched status to trakt and then restore that on an up-to-date install.

I managed to do that once but I made the mistake of updating to the latest version of emby in the VM and that wiped all the watched status and synced to trakt without me realizing what happened so I lost everything on trakt too and after multiple tries recreating this, even on a fresh VM, it's always failing to restore the data for some reason.

What I'm doing now and what I remember working was to use the same old emby server version(3.3.1.0) on a VM with the same user and the media mounted(using samba) in the exact same location in my home folder like on the now broken server, follow the instruction from How to backup manually from the support section of the site( https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001159936-configuration-backup ) but once the scan of my 3 library path is over, my watched status isn't restored and the library file becomes about 70MB smaller(172MB to 105MB).

What I did extra this latest try from the instructions is delete the user created by the installation in config\users and set the owner to emby:emby recursively to everything I copy over.

 

Does anyone have any idea what could be going wrong here or has any idea on how to restore the watched status of my old library? I don't care about basically anything else, I just need the watched status. I also have access to the current data on the messed up server if that can help which should technically still be fine since I never managed to update emby-server there, but it should be the same as my current backup since nothing changed since.

Also, is there a way to prevent a potential wipe of the data on trakt by the plugin if the watched status somehow accidently reverts? It kind of makes the plugin not very useful as a backup of the library watched status, at least with the settings I used.

[Samkook 12]

I managed to make it work after all, always happens once you ask for help and not during the days you spend trying to figure out why on your own.

After following the restoration procedure, I shutdown emby, restored the backup once again and now it magically worked. Still don't know why exactly but after the initial restore and once the library folders are already there, restoring the backup will always worked. Didn't work on the old VM though, had to start fresh.

The trakt plugin wiped the watched status a few times since the version that works on 3.3.1.0 is more confusing to configure than the most recent one but it worked after a few tries and I just finished restoring everything on the up-to-date version.

I'm going to have to find an alternative to trakt for backuping stuff because I really don't like how much it can mess things up in both ways and all I want is a way to marks stuff as watched automatically without the possibility to automatically remove that status but as long as everything works as it should, all will be well.

Edited June 18, 2021 by Samkook

[Happy2Play 8273]

I have experienced having to do a restore twice in the past, as you are on a old version it could be a quirk from back then.

But glad you got it resolved.