I have the model Tablo QUAD or QUAD 1TB OTA DVR. I know it comes with a whopping 1 TB of internal storage- is there away to use both storage devices at the same time (and be able to access them in the software at the same time).
Also, I assume you can attached multiple hard drives and attach and reattach them with programs you may want to save “off line” the unit. Thanks, Mark
It’s either or. You can’t use both and you can’t attach and use multiple external drives.
But you can fill up a drive, and detach and attach a new one- using one drive at a time?
Nope.
Edit: Many of us have Plex Media Servers (or other media server) and so we use 3rd party tools to download recordings off our Tablo units and then delete them from there. Thus the Tablo becomes a temporary space for recordings for us. Either for things we intend to get rid of, or for things we plan to download via 3rd party tools to our media servers prior to deleting them off the Tablo.
Edit2: As one person has already tried, a 12TB drive seems to work on the Tablo, and that’s a whole lot of recordings.
So I suppose you have to reinitialize the unit/disk drive each time you change it, and this wipes all previous data from the drive ? meaning you can only use data on one drive- but you can migrate/change the drive if you are willing to start over.
Thanks!
Edit 1: I just read your edits, and that seems to direct me into the directions of downloading recordings off the Tablo to a third party provider. any suggestions on what software works well for this would be appreciated.
You’ll find posts by people that have recipes to copy data from a smaller drive to a larger drive (talking about upgrading the external attached usb drive).
For some, they just extract using the 3rd party tools and start fresh, scrapping anything else.
Thanks for the information- this sounds like a great option, and since I already have 1 TB internal, I do not think I would need external storage.
I’m biased. But if you’re a Linux user and don’t mind Python 2, you can use SurLaTablo (author). Obviously, it’s what I use (latest version is 2.3).
Oh cool, I am an IT guy, and it has been a very long time since I have worked in Linux or Unix. But I am guessing it may the cheapest and most efficient way to do this… what other architectures/softwares are there to accomplish this? I assume windows based ones?
I’ve used Tablo Ripper for many years and it works great in the windows environment.
Just to give you another option, Tablo Tools is another good one…
Since I’m running mine on Mac, Tablo Tools is the one I use. It does it’s job well. There is one caveat to watch out for. For some shows, if there was a 2 part episode that originally aired as a single, double-length episode, but is now broadcast as 2 separate episodes as a rerun, sometimes they get the same episode number. Tablo Tools has different settings to deal with duplicates and if you use the wrong one, you end up with only 1 of the 2 episodes, as the other is either overwritten, or skipped. You want to make sure you use the ‘add id’ setting, so you don’t lose episodes in cases like these. I now have a bunch of series with ‘missing’ episodes that I’m waiting to re-rerun so I can pull them properly this time around. 
Once the episodes are pulled down, I run them through Tiny Media Manager to automatically pull all the episode metadata and tag them, but that’s only because I use them in an offline mode in LibreElec in our RV. Otherwise I’d be able to just dump straight into our Plex library and Plex will usually handle the episode matching, metadata, etc…
@CaptainAmericanSoul Hi there, just to make sure the issue is clarified for your information, the reason the hard drive cannot simply be swapped with a new one when full is that it not only houses your recordings, but also the full database associated with it the Tablo. This means all of your settings, the name of the unit, your schedules, etc.
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