I was an early adapter and bought one of the first 4-tuner Tablo DVRs. At that time, we were limited to one hard disk with a maximum capacity of 1 TB. My 1 TB Seagate is nearly full with wonderful commercial-free movies (courtesy of my local PBS channel) and memorable special shows that I wish to retain. From some of the aging posts on this forum, I sense that Tablo management has decided that there is no need for a hard drive transition path to either a larger hard disk or to activate the second USB drive to accommodate a second HD. I find this very disappointing. Surely, there are many other early supporters and new users who start out with lower capacity hard drives that fill up as that learn the value of the Tablo system.
I have seen some reference in this forum to a PC-based transfer of recordings from a small HD to a larger HD. As a Mac user, I am unable to try this unsupported approach. Please Tablo, provide a hard disk upgrade transition for your loyal users. I would prefer to transfer my data to a larger hard disk, but I would be very happy to have the second USB jack activated.
SurLaTablo.py also works just fine on OS X. Pull your archival shows off the Tablo and only keep stuff on there that you’re going to watch and delete. Because if you really want to save those shows, you want to back them up anyway.
What would be best is a feature where you plug the new harddrive into the second port and have Tablo do it for you but not sure if the hardware can handle that.
I am a mac user and I did the transfer with VMWARE running Gparted (linux based disk utility from a bootable CD) … that said you could either just use the “dd” command from a terminal prompt (dd is the same on a mac as it is linux) or boot with gparted live CD and have both drives connected to your mac… I opted for vmware/gparted live cd since I wanted to be able to use my mac during the transfer since depending on how full your source drive is and if your mac has usb 3 ports or not it could take hours… going via vmware also let me eliminate the possibility of accidentally clobbering my OSX boot disk as you can only attach USB disks to the virtual machine and you have to go out of your way to do so (so it made it a bit safer of an option if a touch slower)
I wont go into DD or Gparted steps here as both could have very serious repercussions if you select the wrong target drive and overwrite your boot/OSX drive… please research these options carefully and understand how to use them fully before proceeding as the damage caused can be irreversible (make sure you have a fresh timemachine backup if you are unsure as that would be your only recovery option if you accidentally overwrite your boot drive)