[xbmcuser01]

I always avoid "updating" Kodi on my Xbox like the plague. But every now and then I accidentally hit the A button (to start Kodi) twice and then it updates.

And today again IT DELETED ALL MY SETTINGS AND PROGRESS IN TV SHOWS, MOVIES, ETC.

Why always this s*ite? Quit fixing something that ain't broken: the so-called "updates" bring nothing new nor do they fix things.

Have the dev's any idea how f***ing irritating it is to have to determine where you were in watching (several) TV series? Takes days. DAYS I tell you. I had to restrain myself to not throw my Xbox through the (closed) window. Yes I know: I have anger issues. This happens again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Every friggin update deletes EVERYTHING you've set. And setting up Kodi is a pain, everybody knows. Its menu system is a SNaFU. Example: do you know where you set the languages for subtitles (for us non-English people on Earth)? NOT in the subtitle add-on of choice. Nope. It's in: Settings > Player > scoll down to "languages to download subtitles for". Took me hours to find out (including Googling). 

Thanks a lot guys for yet another completely unnecessary "update" that causes us to scroll though hours of TV shows and movies to see where we were watching it.



P.S. The update also takes a friggin' long time for a measly 130 MB but that's probably because Microsoft - the richest company in the world - couldn't be bothered to buy some bandwidth.

[Hitcher]

Mine updated and my settings are all fine and it's unlikely Kodi deleted them. Also, if this has happened to you before why aren't you backing them up?

[Sidewinder_2011]

Don't know why it's deleted your settings , why not backing up ? Also check here https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/releases/tag/21.1-Omega u will see that kodi team has fixed on the update. Where else would be the subtitles setting be , the player plays them , I don't want to download a addon to use subtitles and change them .

[otinley]

Mine updated and my settings are all fine.

Ditto

[PatK]

Arf: the word ditto has an age implication to it.

[otinley]

Arf: the word ditto has an age implication to it.

So?  I've earned every single one of my wrinkles.
At least I know when to use its and it's, which, apparently, you never have learnt.
ie: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid3202432

[xbmcuser01]

Thanks or the tip on backing up settings. But even if that also saves progress (where you were in watching TV shows & movies) it's un-doable to do that every day. Why does an update even overwrite settings? Never happens when I update a game.

And the million dollar question: what did this update even "repair" or "add" on the Xbox? Kodi was working just fine, it needed no update...

[xbmcuser01]

[...] check here https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/releases/tag/21.1-Omega u will see that kodi team has fixed on the update. [...]

In that (incomprehensible) list I can see nothing that my Xbox did wrong. It was fine and needed no update. Did the "update" fix anything for you (rhetorical question)? 
 

[...] Where else would be the subtitles setting be , the player plays them , I don't want to download a addon to use subtitles and change them. [...]

In the bloody dialog window that opens when you activate or download a subtitle of course! No "update" the last 15 odd years (ever since Kodi was called XBMC) fixed that. Oh, and by the way: You need an addon to download subtitles and it needs to know for which of the million languages in the world to download a sub for: it won't download 'm all. And no: you cannot set that in the addon itself because Kodi hid it.

[vitusson]

Thanks or the tip on backing up settings. But even if that also saves progress (where you were in watching TV shows & movies) it's un-doable to do that every day. Why does an update even overwrite settings? Never happens when I update a game.The

A backup addon does that for you Horst, every day if you set it to. Also my settings were never overwritten by an Kodi update. PEBKAC

And the million dollar question: what did this update even "repair" or "add" on the Xbox? Kodi was working just fine, it needed no update...

Then don't update. Just that easy.

[xbmcuser01]

Thanks or the tip on backing up settings. But even if that also saves progress (where you were in watching TV shows & movies) it's un-doable to do that every day. Why does an update even overwrite settings? Never happens when I update a game.The

A backup addon does that for you Horst, every day if you set it to. Also my settings were never overwritten by an Kodi update. PEBKAC

And the million dollar question: what did this update even "repair" or "add" on the Xbox? Kodi was working just fine, it needed no update...

Then don't update. Just that easy.

Not updating is neigh impossible on an Xbox because if the A button gets pushed twice (accidentally!) the update is forced. I wrote in my top post that I avoid updating like the plague. But since I use Kodi daily there will always come a day that the update is activated unintentionally.

Thanks bout the tip on the backup addon. Do you know what it is called? There are so many addons.



P.S. "Nice" to know that some have never had a botched update but there are those among us that have their settings deleted after a needless update. Why don't the devs fix that, eh? Sometimes the update hangs/freezes. Only solution then is to force a reboot of the Xbox. That never botches the update of a game. However, I'm beginning to think that this messes up the update process for Kodi. Believe me: I've waited for an hour for the update to finish downloading but sometimes it's just stuk. Stuck I tell you. During that time you cannot watch anything of course because Kodi won't start. Ad no: after an accidental update it's too late to backup settings/progress of TV shows. This needs to be addressed because it happened too many times to count. I can't be the only Xbox user having this problem. Or am I the only Kodi on Xbox user?

[docsonhammer]

Try not to take it out on the Kodi team as they have little control in how Xbox forces updates on people, the manner it offers them, or how it conducts them.

That said I've experienced this exact behavior before multiple times on Xbox.

To avoid this there are two important things every Xbox Kodi user should do:

1) Back-up their settings. There is a back-up addon (called backup, it's icon is a floppy disk) but I find it takes over an hour to run even without artwork set to backup on xbox (with artwork set it's also saving actor thumbs so it takes HOURS).

So instead I use the file manager on kodi and I copy the following files from the profile folder (special://profile) to a directory Kodi has write access on either a network share or a locally attached external hard drive:

These are in the "Database" sub-folder:
MyVideos131.db (this is the main one, it may say 121 for very old versions, in future it may say 141 or some other number, the largest number one is the newest one you generally want to save as others are just ignored old copies)
TV44.db (again number may be different, choose the largest number)

Mymusic83.db (only needed if you store music)
addons33.db (I don't backup this one myself, it seems to have addon data, it may help retaining addon states, I don't use any addons that need to retain data)

These are in the main profile folder:
sources.xml
mediasources.xml
passwords.xml (warning: this contains your network share passwords in plaintext, store it in a secure location)
guisettings.xml

Also don't forget to keep a backup of your advancedsettings.xml file if you made one.

To do this you use the x button on an xbox controller over the file to bring up the menu and select copy or if using a remote control (not controller but tv remote) with xbox then the button with the 3 horizontal lines should do it. Copy from profile to your back-up folder you have write access to.

With these you can basically entirely restore your kodi set-up and settings by copying them back on a fresh install. The one caveat is with this method artwork is not saved though I believe Kodi should try and rescrape it. If like me you have scraped your entire library to files within the media folders using something like tinymediamanager or ember media manager or elk manager (e.g. each movie has a moviename.nfo plus moviename--poster.jpg, banner, fanart, etc in their folder) then Kodi will just pull the artwork from your local source again and you'll just have to go through your movie list and scroll to let Kodi pull the images again. But your ratings, watched status, Kodi preferences should all be retained.

That out of the way.

I think there is an issue with Xbox updates while the app is running (e.g. after you've started it). There may be something Kodi devs can do here I don't know. Most other apps wouldn't care about their cache or files being corrupted as they'd just rebuild it from new each time and pull data from the server.

So instead after getting the update notice, back-up your kodi settings as I indicated above, then close Kodi completely (don't just hit the xbox button to return to the xbox main page as it's still running). You must either choose to shut down Kodi from the power symbol in Kodi while it's running, restart your xbox or select the Kodi app and click the menu button and select exit or close app at the bottom (if it doesn't offer those then it's already not running). Once Kodi is completely not running, go to your app and games manager (top of the screen symbol for apps and games, click it), find the manage section, go to updates and choose to update Kodi from there while it's shut down.

This /should/ allow a cleaner transition but it's important to back-up.

[xbmcuser01]

Try not to take it out on the Kodi team as they have little control in how Xbox forces updates on people, the manner it offers them, or how it conducts them.

That said I've experienced this exact behavior before multiple times on Xbox.

To avoid this there are two important things every Xbox Kodi user should do:

1) Back-up their settings. There is a back-up addon (called backup, it's icon is a floppy disk) but I find it takes over an hour to run even without artwork set to backup on xbox (with artwork set it's also saving actor thumbs so it takes HOURS).

So instead I use the file manager on kodi and I copy the following files from the profile folder (special://profile) to a directory Kodi has write access on either a network share or a locally attached external hard drive:

These are in the "Database" sub-folder:
MyVideos131.db (this is the main one, it may say 121 for very old versions, in future it may say 141 or some other number, the largest number one is the newest one you generally want to save as others are just ignored old copies)
TV44.db (again number may be different, choose the largest number)

Mymusic83.db (only needed if you store music)
addons33.db (I don't backup this one myself, it seems to have addon data, it may help retaining addon states, I don't use any addons that need to retain data)

These are in the main profile folder:
sources.xml
mediasources.xml
passwords.xml (warning: this contains your network share passwords in plaintext, store it in a secure location)
guisettings.xml

Also don't forget to keep a backup of your advancedsettings.xml file if you made one.

To do this you use the x button on an xbox controller over the file to bring up the menu and select copy or if using a remote control (not controller but tv remote) with xbox then the button with the 3 horizontal lines should do it. Copy from profile to your back-up folder you have write access to.

With these you can basically entirely restore your kodi set-up and settings by copying them back on a fresh install. The one caveat is with this method artwork is not saved though I believe Kodi should try and rescrape it. If like me you have scraped your entire library to files within the media folders using something like tinymediamanager or ember media manager or elk manager (e.g. each movie has a moviename.nfo plus moviename--poster.jpg, banner, fanart, etc in their folder) then Kodi will just pull the artwork from your local source again and you'll just have to go through your movie list and scroll to let Kodi pull the images again. But your ratings, watched status, Kodi preferences should all be retained.

Thank you for taking this problem seriously and confirming that Kodi on Xbox indeed overwrites/loses all it's settings on an update sometimes.

I backed up everything that's in the folder that I can see when I use Kodi's file manager. It's the folder "Profile directory" (erm... probably a shortcut to the profile directory). That takes a while indeed... The copy process does not offer me the option to "overwrite if newer" or to "skip duplicates". Copying only the "Database" folder and all the (.xml) files in the root of the profile dir takes only half a minute or so. My brand new profile dir is now 237 MB. The "thumbnails" dir alone is  217 MB (= 92 %)!

I'll have a look into your tips on what to skip to speed up the process and how to automate it via an add-on.

What I don't know if my progress in watching TV shows and movies (i.e. at what time you stopped playing back a movie and which episodes you've already seen) is in there too or if there's another location on the Xbox's hard disk where that's saved... Does anybody know what file in what directory saves progress?

 

That out of the way.

I think there is an issue with Xbox updates while the app is running (e.g. after you've started it). There may be something Kodi devs can do here I don't know. Most other apps wouldn't care about their cache or files being corrupted as they'd just rebuild it from new each time and pull data from the server.

So instead after getting the update notice, back-up your kodi settings as I indicated above, then close Kodi completely (don't just hit the xbox button to return to the xbox main page as it's still running). You must either choose to shut down Kodi from the power symbol in Kodi while it's running, restart your xbox or select the Kodi app and click the menu button and select exit or close app at the bottom (if it doesn't offer those then it's already not running). Once Kodi is completely not running, go to your app and games manager (top of the screen symbol for apps and games, click it), find the manage section, go to updates and choose to update Kodi from there while it's shut down.

This /should/ allow a cleaner transition but it's important to back-up.

I also would appreciate it very much if the devs would take this serious. It's not a trivial error. It's irritating as hell. And I don't think it's nice if you're a developer and people avoid your updates - on which you worked very hard - like the plague.

[Karellen]

... Does anybody know what file in what did saves progress?

The MyVideos database.
It would be better if you run regular library exports which will preserve all that info in an nfo file.

[xbmcuser01]

... Does anybody know what file in what did saves progress?

The MyVideos database.
It would be better if you run regular library exports which will preserve all that info in an nfo file.

Thanks.

I'd like to keep things short and simple. Formost because I forget how to "do things Kodi" after a month or so. Every time I lose my settings (and progress) then I update the library. That takes a while but I do that when I'm not using Kodi. Then the Library is like it was before. Is it really much better for saving progress to (also) back up the Library?

[Karellen]

Is it really much better for saving progress to (also) back up the Library?

The nfo files?
Yes, definitely. And it is much faster to rescan your library when rebuilding. In my library of 617 movies and all local info I can scan all movies in 3min 58 sec.