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Backups for my Tivo disk drive

By Tony Pearson posted Mon September 17, 2007 03:28 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


A few weeks ago, my Tivo(R) digital video recorder (DVR) died. All of my digital clocks in my house were flashing 12:00 so I suspect it wasa power strike while I was at the office. The only other item to die was the surge protector,and so it did what it was supposed to do, give up its own life to protect the rest of myequipment. Although somehow, it did not protect my Tivo.

I opened a problem ticket with Sony, and they sent me instructions on how to send itover to another state to get it repaired.Amusingly, the instructions included "Please make a backup of the drive contents beforesending the unit in for repair." Excuse me? How am I supposed to do that, exactly?

My model has only a single 80GB drive, and so my friend and I removed the drive and attachedit to one of our other systems to see if anything was salvageable. It failed every diagnostictest. There was just not enough to read to be usable elsewhere.

This is typical of many home systems. They are not designed for robust usage, high availability, nor any form of backup/recovery process. Some of the newer models havetwo drives in a RAID-1 mode configuration, but most have many single points of failure.

And certainly, it is not mission critical data. Life goes on without the last few episodesof Jack Bauer on "24", or the various Food Network shows that I recorded for items I planto bake some day. For the past few weeks, I have spent more time listening to the radioand reading books. Somehow, even though my television runs fine without my Tivo, watchingTV in "real time" just isn't the same.

I suspect that if you gave someone a method to do the backup, most would not bother to useit. People are now relying more and more heavily on their home-basedinformation storage systems, digital music, video and cherished photographs. Perhaps experiencing a "loss" will help them appreciate backup/recovery systems so much more than they do today.

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Comments

Archive User
Tue September 18, 2007 07:02 AM

I feel your pain.
Having owned now 5 TiVo boxes (all with drive upgrades), and having experienced the joys of a drive failure on most of them, my own solution is now to backup important shows onto my laptop using TiVoToGo. With the latest TiVo Desktop you can even have this happen automatically as new shows are recorded. When I want to watch them, I can copy them back to the TiVo, or I can just watch them on my lappy (great for those 16 hours trips to Signapore, Tony). And you can even copy them to a DVD if you'd like more permanent backup.
The only exception has been my TiVo Series 3 (HD), since TTG isn't yet supported. But TiVo has announced this will be available in the November(ish) timeframe, so soon I'll start backup that up as well.
Looks like I could be pushing 10+TB in my home soon, though! (see http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2007/06/0012_a_terabyte.html)

Archive User
Tue September 18, 2007 03:20 AM

Tony, Chris,
Indeed, this is a pain. My Sky+ box obviously has started getting some hard errors. I wouldn't mind if there was some way of doing a media scan and marking bad blocks - these after-all are the cheapest of the cheap PATA drives inside.
The most annoying thing about the bad blocks is that it renders the entire recorded program which covers the bad block(s) as unviewable - presumably due to said encryption. So now I have several programs with the (K) keep option set, purely so they cover the areas with bad blocks!
Must dig out that instruction I downloaded for making my 80GB box into a 160GB box by replacing the drive - if of course I can still source such a small PATA drive that is!

Archive User
Mon September 17, 2007 08:11 PM

Your home system is very usable for TiVo drive recovery. A Live CD of Knoppix 4.0.2 with the dd_rhelp script to use dd_rescue was able to salvage all but one block, which the TiVo happily scrubbed as a bad show.
See my post here...http://archive2.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=262981
The download mentioned in the post is available at http://www.shokk.com/downloads/dd.tgz