errors with backing up and restoring database

hello,

i recently backed up my database and restored it
and found a few errors.

I used the database maintenances...music database backup function
then i Dropped my database using mysql, and re created it.
then i copied the resulting file from the backup dir to the import dir
and ran the admin function "tab delimited file import".
it took quite a while ( 1-2 hours on p3 450mhz 256mb ram),
but seemed to function properly,
when it was done it mentioned something about moving the file
and when i look in the import directory the file was no longer there,
but the file is still in the backup directory where it started.

the backup file was about 8MB as it covers 150GB of mp3,
over 40k files.
i would say it had less than 10 errors when restored.
i caught the errors because i had been reducing out genres that
only had one or 2 entries in them, and after restoring, there were
some new genre, which ended up being corrupted entries in backup file

when i view the backup file using vi ,looking at the corrupted entries,
they have a "^@" in the artist field.  vi must think this is some kind
of end of line character or something, because the text is in blue,
where
the rest of it is in black.  Similar to the end of line you see when you
look at a dos file in vi, but the blue characters are in the middle of
the
line, not at the end of it.
What ends up happening is the fields get mangled,
and "off by one" until the next record  

i looked at the tags on these files, but didnt see anything weird .
one thing common about the files seems to be that they
have been re-encoded from >128kB to 128kB, using lame,
and have both a v1 and v2 tag, inserted with MP3::Tag.

There is a possibility that the id3 tag was extracted from
the filename, which was extracted from the subject line
of a binary newsgroup posting, using aub.

I just thought i would mention this, so people would be aware.
If anyone has advise how i can avoid this problem in the future,
i would like to know.  or else i am going to get
all my tags straight, then re-import my entire collection.

if you would like to see portions of the backup file,
or the mp3's that are related to the errors, i can provide them.

I am really excited about this program,
as i have been wanting to clean up my tags and files for quite some
time,
but it is too overwhelming to attempt manually, and this software
can make it a manageable project for me.

thanks
randy

 





-- 
Randy Perkins <[email protected]>