[sbt]

Well, this is my first post....

Some background...

Have been a (happy) user of the original mobilesheets on android from sometime. Due to some recent happenings (tablet took a major spill, power adapter went out right before rehearsal leaving the tablet with no juice) I figured I needed a backup solution. Since I recently bought a windows 10 tablet figured I would 1) purchase mobilesheets pro for windows 10 2) give the backup/restore feature a try. figured it should be easy. unfortunately I had alot of problems. 

Figured I would share my experience and lessons learned. I think I may have found some bugs. I may be unique in the problems I was having. If not, maybe my notes might help someone (if only the developer).

CAVEAT: have not updated in my mobilesheets on android on a while. I am believer in "if it ain't broke" don't fix it and have not been having any problems. I believe all of the other software (e.g. mobilesheets pro) should be up-to-date since I just installed them.

 NOTE: I am a S/W & H/W engineer (as well as a musician). Pretty good at troubleshooting and pretty patient. Probably more so that most folks in dealing with this kind of stuff.

So my expectation was that I should be able to 1) backup my android, 2)  take that backup and restore it on my windows tablet and "voila!!!" be in business on my new windows tablet.

Unfortunately, that failed miserably. The backup went fine. no errors. the restore went fine. no errors. hmmm. great...well when I went to view the songs found out that half of the 1300 songs I tried to restore were not there. ugggggh. 

ok. so first suspect....maybe the backup is corrupted. by the way, I did a direct backup on android to a flash drive. the restore was from that same flash drive. 

so, I loaded companion product on a windows machine and extracted the backup. everything there? ugggggh. so the backup is not corrupted. Oh, before that I did a backup with the companion tool over wifi (which took forever) and ended up with the same size backup file and restore failed (similary) on that file as well.

oh, I guess I should note that I used the default config on windows. mainly, "use directories" and "don't use unique filenames".

the latter may be part of the problem. the files that failed all had unique numbers appended.

so I cleared database on windows, set the config to make the files unique, and did the restore again. same problem. did not restore the file with unique names. however, at least the file names that it was looking for were correct. just not there (i.e. it did not restore). ugggh.

another curiosity was that it sometimes looked for files in the root of the storage directory and sometimes within a directory? the former mainly for the files that did not restore. not sure of the logic or reason.

anyway, since I was able to extract all of the files with the companion tool I just copied all of the PDFs, mp3, etc. Kind of a waste of space since half of them restored (to directories) but I did not want to try to figure out which restored and which did not.

my objective was not have to manually edit the song. I did not meet that objective, that was my objective.

I ran the "missing file" utlity and before and after copying files to the root of the storage directory and it reduce the list significantly.

so now I am down to like 60 files that are still not lining up.

so here are the remaining problems (bugs?):

- for some reason the restored filenames in the database are being truncated. almost looks like look it found the song name in the filename and truncated anything before it (e.g. "artist - title.mp3" -> "title.mp3"). it did this PDFs, MP3s, etc. strange. so I just modified the filename to match in windows explorer. having the unique number in the file name help alot. then reran the missing file tool.

- last (but not least),  for some reason some (audio) filenames were the original android name (e.g. /removable/microsd/.../song.mp3) and not the relative storage filename. obviously for those I had to edit the song to fix. there was only like 10 of those even though I had alot more audio files.

after all of this I got a clean "missing file" report. yeah!!!!

whew. so what I thought would take like an hour or so... took quite a bit longer.

I think there may be some bugs in there or maybe that have already been fixed. not sure. Searched the forum and found very little on restore problems on windows 10. So kinda felt on my on and just now got approved for the forum.

here are couple possible feature requests which I think are reasonable

- to be able to rerun the find missing report without having to go back. like a refresh button or something)
- to be able to edit the file name directly from the find missing report by clicking on it without having to go into another dialog.

also, it might be a bit much, but

- be able to run the missing file report from companion and have it being able to search the database extract location to fix. this would have fixed 80% of my problem. you could also put some of the other fixes (e.g. filename truncation) in there.

ok, that's it. hope this is useful. let me know if you are running into similar problems.

thanks.


-tony-

[itsme]

Sciurius has written some very useful additional tools for MSPro: https://github.com/sciurius/MSPro-Tools
They are not for everybody as they are command line tools, require a working Perl environment and some general computer knowledge.
They are a great help for investigating issues like the ones you are facing and offer lots of possibilities for power users

[sbt]

Sciurius has written some very useful additional tools for MSPro: https://github.com/sciurius/MSPro-Tools
They are not for everybody as they are command line tools, require a working Perl environment and some general computer knowledge.
They are a great help for investigating issues like the ones you are facing and offer lots of possibilities for power users

Thanks for the reference. I will check it out. I am not really a perl person (more python) but can setup (e.g. under cygwin) if necessary.

-tony-

[Zubersoft]

Thanks for the write-up Tony. How large is the backup file you used? Is there any possibility you would be willing to upload it to cloud storage and share a link with me so I can test with it? I haven't encountered the problems you've listed, so it would help significantly to have the same backup file you used.

As for the audio file path issue, Microsoft has a maximum file path limitation of 256 characters in some of their API calls. It's ridiculous, but I have to force every file path to be 255 characters or less, or some of their functions start throwing exceptions. So if the path to the audio file on Windows would exceed that amount, I shorten the name. What is your storage location? Does it seem likely that this is the problem?

I'll look into accomodating your feature requests when I can. I'd prefer fixing things so people don't have to use that utility rather than spending more time enhancing it if possible...

Thanks,
Mike

[sbt]

Thanks for the write-up Tony.  How large is the backup file you used? Is there any possibility you would be willing to upload it to cloud storage and share a link with me so I can test with it? I haven't encountered the problems you've listed, so it would help significantly to have the same backup file you used.

As for the audio file path issue, Microsoft has a maximum file path limitation of 256 characters in some of their API calls. It's ridiculous, but I have to force every file path to be 255 characters or less, or some of their functions start throwing exceptions. So if the path to the audio file on Windows would exceed that amount, I shorten the name. What is your storage location? Does it seem likely that this is the problem?

I'll look into accomodating your feature requests when I can. I'd prefer fixing things so people don't have to use that utility rather than spending more time enhancing it if possible...

Thanks,
Mike

The file is like over a Gig (actual >1.5G). So I not really inclined to upload it. It seems I am unique (at least right now) in terms of trying to do this kind of migration.

Note, the thing of the file name being changed was not just audio files and seemed deliberate. Like I mentioned is was something like "artist - title.pdf" being changed to "title.pdf". One thing I have a tendency to do is put multiple song on a one handwritten sheet. I will list the all of the songs in the file on the filename and then do multiple imports and modify the name of the song to match song I am interested in. So basically the same song file is imported and but it will have diff song names. I do this so multiple song names show up in my set. for example of may have charted several bruno mars song into one file say "chunky, treasure.pdf" then when I import that file I will change the default song name to "chunky" and "treasure" respectively when I am editing. there is probably a better way to do this. anyway, I wonder if the problem is related to that. I do that alot.


the problem with the file name not being change to the local name was only audio files. the local storage location is "d:\mobilesheets". so not very long?

I figured you would say that in terms of the feature request(s) and totally understand.

[Zubersoft]

I just realized you said you were using the original MobileSheets on Android and not MobileSheetsPro. Going from MobileSheets on Android to MobileSheets on Windows 10 is a lot more error prone than going from MobileSheetsPro->MobileSheets due to the huge number of differences, some of which aren't easily resolved when going from the Android OS to Windows 10. Without a backup file, I definitely won't have any way of looking into this I'm afraid. Hopefully you have things in a working state now and sorry I can't do more.

Mike

[mgd]

Thanks for the reference. I will check it out. I am not really a perl person (more python) but can setup (e.g. under cygwin) if necessary.

For Perl on Win32 I would give Strawberry Perl a try. Much less hazzle than running it under cygwin and other than ActiveState Perl comes with a friendly license no matter if you are using it personally or for business.