Hard drive clone

With the anticipated new firmware update which will allow hard drives >2TB, request a feature to plug in both hard drives to the Tablo and an automated way to copy/move recordings from existing hard drive to another. I know there’s a work around to copy stuff over to a new hard drive (I’ve done it), but this automated process would greatly help. This would also be a nice feature to provide a backup to recordings for folks that want to go down that path.

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I would love this as well. I have thought about upgrading to a larger hard drive to build a larger movie collection.

It’s something I’ve lobbied for but unfortunately we aren’t able to have this in place for the update that will enable larger drives.

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Any recommendations for how to do it manually for those of us comfortable with linux/unix? … what method do you recommend to accomplish it? … straight “dd” or format+rsync, etc ?

@ericgus - Unfortunately it requires root access to the O/S. This is why we want to be able to create a utility to make it easier.

I have a few linuxes box that I have root access on (I created them… eg my PLEX server being one of them)… (I do understand your response for those who don’t) … I am just looking for the most compatible method to duplicate the drive assuming I take my Tablo hard drive off the tablo and temporarily connect it to one of my linux machines … My family wouldn’t really be excited to loose all their previously recorded stuff (more so my son since they took Caillou off the local PBS station)

The best option is to download the content using @Jestep’s utility.

I did it with a GParted Live disc. Takes a while, but it was errorless.

Yea that isnt going to work for the purpose I need … but thanks for the suggestion.

did you expand to a larger drive? … gparted is along the lines of what I was thinking just wasnt sure if when cloning to a larger drive it the Tablo recognized the large disk on the new copy.

I went from 500GB to a 2TB drive. Took a long time but haven’t had any issues. Had to expand the volume to 2TB after the copy.

Thanks … ill probably do something similar now that I know thats a path that works.

You can just set the hard disk to GPT so you can use a disk > 2TB. I think File Sync of AOMEI Backupper, a freeware capable of cloning HDD, will do what you need . You can set a schedule to automatically synchronize two folders to copy/move recordings from existing hard drive to another

I primarily use OSX and Linux … I might be able to borrow a windows machine but I generally dont have one of those.

So I take it there is no way to clone the drive on OS X? I was wanting to do this as well, I have a new drive arriving in a few days.

Maybe I need to investigate but if there is a bootable version of Gparted that boots on the mac it might work… but I am looking for something that runs native… I was looking at Carbon Copy Cloner in block mode.

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A GParted Live disc will boot on a Mac

Thanks again! … I haven’t really looked much into it yet.

I need to find the directions on how to burn it to a USB as I have a newer mac that lacks a CD drive… though gparted aside, I was thinking simple “dd” would probably work from the osx command line but I can’t think of a way after the fact to expand the free space on the new copy from osx itself…

I just got my 2 TB WD elements drive in. I have my recordings on a 1TB elements drive, what is a workflow on OS X for a non-programmer type person to clone the drive?

or I have parallels. can I download a virtual image and run it that way? i’m lost. :flushed: