# Recovering Beets Configuration

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/recovering-beets-configuration/332>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [April 19, 2018, 7:59am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/recovering-beets-configuration/332 "2018-04-19T07:59:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bemeurer](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/bemeurer/32/130_2.png) [@bemeurer](https://discourse.beets.io/u/bemeurer)\
**Post date:** [April 19, 2018, 7:59am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/recovering-beets-configuration/332/1 "2018-04-19T07:59:51Z")

</div>

I have a fairly tidy, hand-organized, library, which I recently decided to move to beets. I went through the, very long, process of importing everything and cleaning up afterwards, only to experience a catastrophic hardware failure.

Luckily, I had automatically backed up both the beets music folder, as well as the library.db and beets.log. Sadly, I had lost my config.yaml file. Is there some way to recover the config.yaml via the log and/or the library?

[beets.log](https://mega.nz/#!VGxxQQAY!IhuliWI2Jz52cuDllbpx4vcXxSFZrDSvPRxx5BWgGY4)  
[library.db](https://mega.nz/#!oLxEiBpL!Uk33ug2_wHw-3dpuQa4w0uVqhGcsToOLz0PkO0y8Uac)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Freso](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/freso/32/21_2.png) [@Freso](https://discourse.beets.io/u/Freso)\
**Post date:** [April 19, 2018, 8:38am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/recovering-beets-configuration/332/2 "2018-04-19T08:38:48Z")

</div>

Note that this was also brought up on IRC:  
[https://botbot.me/freenode/beets/msg/99151712/](https://botbot.me/freenode/beets/msg/99151712/)

Like it was said there, neither the log file not the database file contains any information (directly) about what was in your `config.yaml` file. Some information may be derived from it (e.g., `paths`), but a lot of other things will be permanently lost. I looked at your .log file and it basically contains nothing other than a list of directories that were skipped for importing. If you were using any plugins etc., you will simply have to remember which ones and reenable them.

On IRC you worried about inconsistencies. I honestly wouldn’t worry too much about that. Most things you can force-update everything in your database (e.g., `beet fetchart --force` to fetch cover art for all releases, overwriting already existing ones).

Unless of course you’ve done fancy things with your setup that you’re not telling us about, I would just make a config that points to your existing database, log file, and music directory.