New Tablo user here - so … if I picked up on this correctly … if I resurrect an old Ubuntu PC, I can ‘read’ the recorded files on my Tablo Dual Lite Hard drive?
Tell me more 
Dennis
Yes and no. As islands without metadata, might be difficult to make sense of it all.
Wow … thanks
If you aren’t afraid of messing with hardware and not afraid of voiding any warranties. . You may be able to pull the harddrive out of the enclosure and attach it directly. I made one copy via USB 3.0 and one copy for experimentation with both disks attached via SATA, It was at least 4x faster for me.
I would definitely leave this one for people that know what they are doing.
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The DUAL LITE actually has EMMC memory that is onboard, not a traditional spinning drive so this will indeed void the warranty and result only in frustration 
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I was referring to the USB connected drives that often contain a regular SATA drive but there are people skilled enough to handle onboard EMMC as well. There is actually a thriving business replacing the internal Iphone memory. That process is quite difficult and requires special equipment. I’d love to see a hardware hacker upgrade the Tablo Duals internal memory. That person won’t likely be me.
EDIT: For those interested here is the Iphone hardware mod I referred to.
ok, how about this way, can it be done. remove old hd, format the new harddrive then put both into you desktop and just transfer the old content to the new harddrive, then put the new drive back into the tablo? can it work this way???
yes, there are topics and postings about this - I urge you to do a bit of research.
Since this topic is discussed so often Tablo should invest some R&D into implementing a utility to do this for its customers.
Many people have neither the time, tools or technical expertise to perform some of the suggested work arounds.
So @Tablo, come on, built a tool that lets people with minimal technical knowledge upgrade their drives!
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I agree it’d be a great tool, when I upgraded my drives I just decided I didn’t care about the old recordings.
I’d rather they spend more time now working on feature parity across all apps. For example, Remote Viewing on the Roku app and new Fire TV Preview app would be great. The Roku has not had remote viewing since Day 1, almost 5 years now.
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I totally agree!
Yea, everyone has a perspective what’s important. I’ve seen discussions among those who have an idea what they’re doing… and it’s not overly complex.
I’d suspect to an actual developer, with the expertise to code tablo, it wouldn’t be an ordeal. But, there are many variables with the different drives, computers/devices all the users have to complicate things.
Then the big, priorities. When you do need it, you need it - but how often does one swap drives?
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For macOS users, try Disk Utility’s Restore function:
Says it’s to restore a disk image… so you first have to make an image of the disk, which has an ext4 filesystem - I understand a mac can’t read natively. https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/file-system-formats-available-in-disk-utility-dsku19ed921c/mac
Of course an image doesn’t necessarily have to be done specifically by the file system.
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I use Restore to clone my Time Machine drives. You are correct, macOS can’t natively read/write EXT4, my fault, I used FUSE some time ago.
Ubuntu plus Clonezilla should be the best bet for me, now that I have to upgrade my hard drive to 8TB; soon.
This is way better than FUSE! extFS for Mac by Paragon Software 
I’m using the demo now, and I can easily open the Tablo formatted hard drive:
Take note, clonezilla clones drive/partition to drive/partition as is. So… if you new drive is bigger, well you only get what ever size you cloned - unless/until you resize the partition.
(unless newer versions have added this options) If you’re using ubuntu, gparted should be available and make this real easy. (I’m not sure how you use cloneailla from ubuntu, but I’ve always used clonezilla live)
I can’t even remember the last time I used Clonezilla, but I did find out that it has the ability to, "Create partition table proportionally - info link " That should work. Oh yeah, you are right, no need for Ubuntu with Clonezilla Live.
Wow, I remember GParted, I might still have it on my old computer!
@djk44883 Thank you very much for the helpful information.
I don’t use it regularly either. I did use it to swap tablo drives, although I had some idea what I was doing, I headed the warding, Set advanced parameters. If you have no idea keep the default values and do NOT change anything.
But further reading, turns on the “-r” option might have been a better give away than -k1. It would make it zactly perfect for up-sizing drives - so, yea @FritzThird thanks back at you 
A note about gpart, now has the ability to “copy” partitions from device to device (aka clone).
Back to the post topic, it isn’t overly complex, well if you have any idea what any of this means. But if you have no idea what any of this means, I have seen step-by-step tips.
A script could probably be done, but with all the variables ie)platforms make it risky I suppose.
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I had a drive that support said I was having errors and wanted to replace. (still don’t know how a drive went bad in 7 months from western digital) I followed your instructions and they still work. It did take several hours and had to make sure to follow all the instruction well (the flushing cached data to the drive is important) and my old recordings are working it seems.
Thank you for this 4 year old post!
And I liked this method as I didn’t have to mess with booting to unix in any fashion, I would have been able to but really preferred not having to do that.