How to migrate to a bigger drive?

I’m in the same position - off-line hard drive with recorded programs. Would be awful nice if someone wrote a program to pull files off, combining segments into individual broadcasts. That would save people from blown Tablos, overburdened networks, or potentially corrupted databases that Tablo cannot read but where the harddrives have many “valid” broadcasts still recorded.

However, “would be awful nice”…

November 2019: Still no official method or tool.

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No, not official tablo way. They do have a method to move a drive to a new tablo.
In the #tablo-apps:third-party-apps-plex there’s a back-up utility which may help. It works for backing up your current drive, and if necessary, restoring everything thing to another one in the event of failure… or just a new/different drive.

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All,

Will this migration method (rsync via Linux) work between an external drive from my old 4-Tuner, and the 2.5" drive I plan to format inside my new Quad?

I have a feeling the answer is “no” just because the devices are different (different ids).

While the “migrate” recipe is not a Nuvyyo supported thing, maybe they can clarify and support or not support what I just said.

This is just a big, what if…
First try this method - Moving your recordings to a new Tablo official method to move your drive to your new tablo.

When your new tablo has all the metadata settings from your previous device – then try the process of migrating to a different drive, by which ever method.

I’ve done it a long time ago, but forgot just what works best, but that’s subjective and relative. Someone has since wrote a backup/restore 3rd party app - Backup-tablo.sh - Backup all recorded shows from a Tablo - which may come in handy as well.

As there’s no official method, I’m only guessing/suggesting and you’ll have to think for yourself. (I image the support necessary for this process would overload the system)

Thanks, that’s decent advice.

Browsing the http://tablo.lan.ip.address:18080/pvr/ files is fascinating. I can backup those before moving the drive.

What is the most tried/tested method of migrating data? I started reading this and other threads but there is a lot of info.

I do have access to Linux and am comfortable with it. Should I:

  1. Connect new HDD to tablo, let it format
  2. rsync data from 1st tablo to 2nd tablo??

If I use rsync method, will I be copying any tablo config data/scheduling data I want to avoid migrating? Or is that stored someplace other than the HDD?

You will need to let tablo format it. It knows the UUID and “authorizes” it. You my want to look at the back taboo script it you run Linux. It backups and tells you to rsync this and that.

You really don’t need to backup, but start at the restore

Do you know where I can find “back taboo” script? Wasn’t able to find it with search. Thanks!!

I am so sorry, was trying to work from a tablet… quickly
Backup-tablo.sh - Backup all recorded shows from a Tablo

FritzThird this process worked for me. Was able to copy all the data to a new drive. One learning - try and use different USB ports - preferably USB controllers to speed up the process. Had a USB hub which would have required a full day to transfer the data, using two different USB-C ports with USB adapters was able to do it in 5 hours.

Babblebit’s 14-step procedure worked for me. I have just one suggestion for improvement to the procedure. Be sure that the Tablo is turned on when you plug in your new USB hard drive. Otherwize it won’t prompt you to format it. It would show the status of the drive is “unformatted” and “unavailable” but will do nothing about it if the new hard drive is powered up and plugged in when you restore power to the tablo.

Some updated information for all of you also. After formatting my new 4 terrabyte drive (WD Elements) using my Tablo, I shut it down and plugged the new drive into my Windows 7 desktop computer. Tablo formatted the drive as an EXT4 partition, while older documentation talks about EXT3. I installed the latest EXT2Fsd software and I found that this software now fully supports EXT4 and successfully copied all of my “REC” folder data from my old hard drive to my new drive in EXT4 format from Windows 7 Explorer. It worked great!

For me, my old Tablo 4-Tuner hard drive was failing and had lots of bad sectors. It had been causing Tablo to hang when I try to play a recording. With Babblebit’s method, Windows File Explorer simply gave me an error saying that a file had “read errors.” I selected “Skip File” and clicked the “do this for other cases of the same error” and it ran to successful completion. Tablo seems to be working fine with my new 4 Terrabyte hard drive. Thanks Babblebits!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-support-ended-on-january-14-2020

software updates from Windows Update that help protect your PC are no longer available

I just stumbled across my old about the possibilities of recovering shows from an “off-line” drive aka dead/no tablo. Here’s and updated post I have regarding the topic… if by chance it helps anyone someday -

I put off my attempt for a number of months, but am now able to report success moving my recordings from an external drive on my old 4-Tuner to an internal drive on my new Quad.

First, I tried to move over the external drive ( https://support.tablotv.com/hc/en-us/articles/213345486-Moving-your-recordings-to-a-new-Tablo ). This failed, partially, because I didn’t reset the 4-Tuner at first to copy its database. Thankfully, Tablo Support was able to fix that for me by running some sort of maintenance script on the Quad after I gave them remote access.

After that, I powered down and attached both old and new drives to an old Dell running Knoppix (bootable Linux). I was able to use the https://gparted.org tool to copy the ext4 partition from one drive to the other. The new internal drive (an SSD) worked in the Quad as though nothing had changed.

The copy was made easier because a) the new drive was preformatted by the Quad thanks to earlier, failed attempts, and b) it was exactly the same size as the old drive. I suspect neither of those were strictly necessary, but can’t be sure.

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Thought I would share that I was able to use this approach to migrated to a bigger drive this weekend. Had some initial trouble that I am now chalking up to a bad USB cable. Once I figured this out, it was pretty easy. Because of some of the concerns about Ext2FSD on Windows 10, I pulled out an older laptop running Windows 10 Home instead of using my primary PC. I downloaded the 0.69 version of Ext2FSD. I connected the old hard drive using my good cable. I was able to assign a drive letter in Ext2FSD and then copied the contents of the REC folder over to the Documents folder on my laptop. Then I removed the old hard drive and connected the new hard drive which I had already connected to my Tablo Lite unit for formatting. I assigned a drive letter and then copied everything over to the new hard drive’s REC folder. I flushed the cached data per instructions, then reconnected to my table unit which was powered off. Powered it up and had everything that I had copied over. Thanks for the instructions. Worked great.

I am trying the BabbleBits procedure from post 6/123 using Ext2Fsd and am stuck at the above step.

Im not able to view the contents of either source/destination drives using Windows Explorer. The drives and letters are there but when I try to expand the contents of either of the drives, Win10 Explorer throws a popup telling me I need to format the disk before I can use it.

I do see there are /pvr directories having the REC directories inside them via Ext2Fsd, but the utility does not seem to allow any copying.

Any ideas what I may have missed ?

I punted on the Ext2Fsd.

I was able to download the Paragon Software for EXTFS on Mac to successfully copy over the /rec
directory entries on the 1Tb WD Elements drive to the 5Tb drive. The Free 10 day trial accepted all usage capabilities from what I could tell. This was about 931Gb of material and it took all night. Both USB ports and drives are 3.0 but I suppose my transfer speed was limited by the read speed of the older 1Tb source drive.

FWIW, this took about, and im guessing, 8 hours to do the copy.

Notes:
My Macbook was limiting how many objects I could copy as a group, and overall performance through the Mac-Finder was very lethargic at best in trying to instigate the activity.

The easiest way to do this is to open two finder windows side by side, one for each drive and drag from one side to the other. Just dont forget to “mount” both drives and test a drag/drop of a single directory object before you increase the size of the group of objects you are transferring.

When you believe you have completed the entire copy, I recommend you compare the number of objects and the sum total of the space of the objects to validate nothing was missed anywhere.

Direct documentation related to this exact process is scant so you will may have to fumble around before you see what works.

I just plugged in the new drive… my random selections of recording play. The Tablo App seems to be operating normally. I’m Good !

Good luck to those looking to walk down this same path.

I successfully completed the transfer of 1.9 TB of programs (2,607 file folders) from a 2.0 TB Western Digital Elements, to 5.0 TB Seagate using BabbleBit’s 14 step procedure listed in his Jan 2015 post. It took a long time, about 60 hours total, but it worked! If I were to do it again, I would make sure I was using a computer with two, USB 3.0 ports. My little Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1 laptop (Windows 10) only had one 3.0 port (and one 2.0 port). Below are the pertinent details to my transfer. (These are in addition to the procedure from BabbleBits.)

  1. Adjust Power options so that the computer shutdowns “Never” as long as it is plugged in to power.
  2. Disable the WiFi (and/or Ethernet cable) to prevent other programs from accessing the Internet. (My first copy attempt shut down after about 7 hours (target drive disconnect). Fortunately I did not lose the files that had been transferred before the disconnect. I speculate that the computer was getting overtaxed – maybe Windows trying to download an update – so I decided it was best to shutdown the WiFi, and didn’t have the disconnect problem again.
  3. Used an ANKER 10 port USB 3.0 hub plugged into the computer’s 3.0 port. (I tried various options of plugging the drives directly into the computer, one in the USB 2.0 port and the other in the USB3.0 port, and there was no apparent speed difference so I left the hub plugged in so I could use the wireless keyboard and mouse that were connected through the hub.
  4. Plugged the target drive into the hub first, assigned drive letter. Then I plugged in source drive to hub and assigned drive letter.
  5. After the first disconnect problem described in 2 above, I selected blocks of 500 file folders (~350GB) in the “rec” folder source drive and copied to “rec” folder target drive. It took about 12 hours to copy the 500 folders. (For most of the transfer I was getting average rates around 10 MB/s – yes, it was very slow.) Repeated until all of the 2,607 folders in “rec” were copied to the 5.0 TB drive. (It was interesting that the last two blocks of 500 folders copied at a much faster rate. The last set of 500 folders (390 GB) transferred in less than 6 hours. Don’t’ know why – perhaps less fragmentation on the disk?)
  6. Lastly I also copied the folder “db” from the source drive to the target. There wasn’t a like named folder on the target drive when it was formatted on the Tablo.
  • When I was about two thirds finished, I tried using a friend’s new Windows 10 desktop with two USB 3.0 ports to speed things up. Unfortunately after installing the Ext2Fsd program, the two Tablo drives showed up as EXT3 instead of the EXT4 that my Tablo formatted them. Windows did not recognize the drive and prompted me to reformat the drives. The problem was probably related to a compatibility issue with the Ext2Fsd program and the new computer. I didn’t attempt to troubleshoot and went back to my Lenovo Yoga to finish the copying.

Again, all worked normally when I plugged the new drive into the Tablo. All the recordings were there, and I now have 3TB of free space! Thanks to BabbleBits for the great instructions. After seven years it is still a great reference!

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