I have a Vero V on the way, and I was finally able to do a manual backup without getting the “tar file not saved” message by browsing to the top level of my attached HDD, rather than a folder on the drive. I was wondering, though what the rationales are for these folders NOT being selected in the backup settings:
Addons Folder
Thumbnails Folder
Rationales aside, would there be any possible benefits to including the folders in a backup to “restore” on my Vero V when it arrives?
Both would primarily be due to them potentially being large and as a result taking up more room and increasing the time to backup. If someone only has addon’s that are natively installed in OSMC and from Kodi’s repository they wouldn’t be needed as part of a backup. As for the thumbnail folder this contains only resized cached copies of artwork. This cache will rebuild itself on first attempt to load each image as long as the source is available. This would be artwork stored with the media files or from the online scraping source. Kodi scraping stores the url of the artwork it pulls from the internet so it can do it again if the cached copy is lost. Note that most Kodi userdata outside of the thumbnails is very small, probably in the tens of megabytes. The thumbnails can consist of many tens of thousands of files that consume many gigabytes with a library of some size.
The upside of including addons would be less issues potentially depending on what you have installed. The upside of including thumbs is that sometimes artwork, online or local, goes missing/changes urls, and including the cache prevents the artwork on these items from being missing and requiring you to manually fix it to get the artwork back.