For the second time now I’ve had my WD Elements 2 TB drive fail. Can you PLEASE add backup capability to the Tablo? I was an early adopter of Tablo having ordered one before they were in production and have seen this topic around for years. There are two USB ports on my Tablo, and it cannot be that hard to add the software to copy the data from a primary drive to a backup drive. Why is this taking so long? I’ve now lost half a season of shows with the only way to get them back is to pay to view them on a streaming service.
I doubt that Tablo will ever have a built-in backup function. The UI complexities would be horrible.
If you think you need to backup your recordings, use one of the several extraction programs available.
Another option is to use a drive cloning program (WD has one that supports EXT4). So if you had a second WD drive you could do a drive clone from time to time. Unfortunately you’d have to disconnect the drive from Tablo to do the cloning, but at least you could have another drive available with most of your recordings.
Thanks for the feedback. Can you point me to info that describes extraction programs? Also, I don’t understand how the user interface would be that complicated with a backup drive. If my Table has two ports and I attach two drives, Tablo designates one as primary and the other as backup. Please explain why the UI would be too complicated. Thank you.
I’ve been using Tablo Ripper to copy content from the Tablo to my local windows hard drive. It can be found here:
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Browse this section of the forums for the extraction programs. https://community.tablotv.com/c/tablo-apps/third-party-apps-plex
SurLaTablo, Tablo Ripper, and Tablo Exporter are the most popular ones. I use SurLaTablo myself.
I was thinking you actually wanted some control over the primary/backup drives. If you just want the Tablo to “handle it”, then the UI is less of an issue. Other than you’re now competing with the segment of the user base that wants to use that second port for additional, rather than redundant, storage. So you need UI to handle that. And you need UI to tell the user if there’s a problem with either drive. And you need UI to handle recovery from a bad drive (when it’s replaced with another good one). And what do you do when the drives aren’t the same size? And so on.
Maybe you should just get better drives. 
I know a lot of people want additional storage on the second port and would like if it could be configured as either expanded storage or backup, it seems easy as I write this! 
Thanks for the info on the rippers and extraction programs, I’ll take a deeper look at these. In the event of another HDD failure, can you rebuild a new HDD on the Tablo with any of these apps? And thanks for the suggestion to use better hard drives, LOL. 
I used the one suggested by Tablo, but I’ll also take another look at users feedback.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at it.
No. They’re pure extraction programs. They convert from the Tablo specific format to something that can be viewed with any number of video playback programs.
There are ways to clone a drive, but they require that the original drive be readable. I suppose you could use something that can clone the drive as an occasional backup method, but that’s going to be very inconvenient as you’ll have to shut down the Tablo and disconnect the drive.
Maybe it’s something in your environment. Are the drives well ventilated? Maybe you’re cooking them.
I’ve lately been mulling the feasibility of the Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/5d-5Dt/) as the USB-attached device…
May solve some shortcomings of the Tablo storage system.
I keep all of my network equipment (of which the Tablo and HDD are part of) in the basement and in an open air rack. My basement never gets above 78 F and this HDD is on it’s own shelf with no other heat generating equipment around it. So unless WD can’t properly design their own enclosure, I don’t think it’s a heat issue.
What’s the operating range for a WD Elements: 5C-35C
I don’t think I would be placing a drive on top or close to the tablo unit. I have multiple tablos and my WD Elements have been spinning away for over 3 years.
I’ve used a Drobo in the past. While they make it brain-dead easy to use a RAID system, my experience was that if you couldn’t install their control software on the host computer, they were slow and noisy. Maybe it’s better now.
A better solution might be a RAID capable external enclosure like https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProRaid-HUR3-SU3S3-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B00KCEAXJW/
I know this is an old thread, so forgive me if this is considered rude here.
After purchasing a Tablo (coming from MythTV), I was worried about all my recorded shows being in a single hard drive without a proper backup. After reading a bit here in the forums, and learning a few neat things about the Tablo webserver, I found a potential way to backup the Tablo’s recorded shows. After some quick sucessfull tests, I wrote a small bash script to backup (not transcode) my recordings to my ZFS server. As a bonus, I wrote directions on how to restore them to a Tablo too 
I’ve named it backup-tablo and placed it on github if anyone is interested in it:
-May the source be with you
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Virtually any propiritary DVR has this downfall. Your work should be in #tablo-apps:third-party-apps-plex section.