Well, I got this text this morning :
Thanks for contacting Tablo Support.
"Transferring recordings from one drive to another to use with the Tablo is unfortunately not possible at this time. There is a third-party program called Tablo Ripper that can help you back up the recordings on your computer, but they cannot be transferred to the Tablo."
I found this thread, unplugged the old 500gb from my Tablo Lite, plugged in the new 4TB, formatted it. Plugged both drives into my old mac. I then downloaded Paragon Software’s ExtFS. I then dragged the files from the “rec” folder on the old drive to the empty “rec” folder on the new drive. Four Hours later…voila…looks like a perfect transfer to me!!!
I am a little surprised that has not figured out an “official” way to do this… Perhaps I am missing something?
Tech support to back this up. The risk of users not understanding and data loss. Not everyone has the same platform, more support headache. Windows doesn’t support ext4 filesystems, so it’s dependant on extra software, more support.
What you may see as “common sense” others may find it as something only a tech would know - wide range of skill sets.
The original Tablo units had two USB ports, so a hard drive migration program might have been possible - but with the newer units only having one USB port, I don’t see how it could work.
And as @djk44883 pointed out not everyone is tech savvy.
Not recommending if it makes you uncomfortable, I understand that. But, if you are plugging these into a Macintosh computer these drives show up in the “Finder”. By that I mean like any other drive, they show up on your “desktop”. And you are simply moving files.
But yes, we are in agreement. Tablo should hire somebody to make this easy and intuitive.
Probably not, since I really doubt the USB port on the Tablo can provide enough power for both drives and the hub itself. So you would need to be using powered drives or get a powered hub, which raises the price to $25 or $30.
And none of which addresses the support burden. Which would be considerable.
All the DB data is stored internally on your tablo device, I don’t think it actually transferred like you think. It may have used the /DB to restore if you did a factory reset.
I don’t need incentive. I’ve done it a couple times, even swapped drives - I understand why taboo doesn’t support it for end-users
Ah!!! I wondered why my settings were there. I understand the programs transferring. I assume that other data might be in another folder? Or, do you actually mean “stored in the device”?
If you watch the network traffic in a browser ie Web Developer > Network in Firefox you’ll see request via port 8885 (and/or 8887) querying information about it.
http://tabloIP:8885/server/harddrives http://tabloIP:8885/server/capabilities
for example - this isn’t stored on the drive. (Well, it can be backed up following the instructions Moving your recordings to a new Tablo but it doesn’t seem to periodically create this, which can also be found via backup-tablo.sh)
If yoiu want to get a listing from your drive it’s port 18080 specifying /pvr [http://tabloIP:18080/pvr/]
Note, this is stuff I’ve found in really, really old posts, just trial 'n error and just searching and searching, some is no longer available. So I’m not really showing you any big secret stuff. Just enough for you to decide if you already know more than you need to, or figure more out if you want to dig deeper.
EDIT: you have to substitute “tabloIP” out for the IP address or local name of your tablo on your local network. ie) http://192.168.0.101:XXXX/
Replying over a year later, because this works. Also not mentioned is that ExtFS also has a Windows version. I did mine using a Mac also, so cannot be certain the Windows version will behave exactly the same.
I had a slightly different issue than most, who seem to be moving onto larger disks. When I first got my Tablo Quad, I went with a store brand 1TB SSD. I don’t keep a huge archive, so any prospect of data loss is minimal concern. After almost 2 years, my Tablo started doing random freezes and apparent restarts. I (correctly) guessed it was that SSD, knowing up front that was less ideal for this use case.
I bought a 1TB WD blue HDD, regular spinning platter style drive. As a geek, I already have a StarTech 2 drive duplicator caddy. Turns out the old drive was a few MB bigger than the new one, so a straight clone operation was not possible. Fortunately the StarTech also can connect the two drives to a computer through a usb cable.
First I installed the new drive in the Tablo and let it power up and format it. Once complete, I shut the Tablo down and put both drives in the StarTech caddy (functionally the same as using 2 usb enclosures). I had installed ExtFS on my MacBook Pro. It comes with a 10 day trial period. Then it was a drag and drop file transfer from old to new. I had roughly 150GB of content that took a couple hours to move. It did throw a transfer error on the last main folder, but I was able to move the contents one by one without further issue and complete the job. Reinstalled the new drive and all the old content was restored and accessible.
To recap:
Install the new drive in the Tablo, start it up, and let it format the new drive.
Upon completion connect both drives to a computer with ExtFS installed.
Open a finder on Mac or File Explorer on Windows for each drive.
There will be some matching system folders on the new drive already. Leave those alone, but look within each of those matching folders and individually drag/drop any files that are on the old folder but not the new one.
The rest will obviously be your saved shows. Select them all and drag them onto the new drive. Then wait. A lot. File copying a large collection will take several hours.
When it’s all done, eject the drives and install the new one back into your Tablo and start it.
Good info. I’m doing similar/same stuff via CLI but have not made it work just yet. It “should” work. Retrying from scratch now using ubuntu 20.04 , new drive formatted via the tablo 4-tuner. On my first try I probably didn’t have the directory permissions correct on new drive, among other issues.
There is a file called “.wake” in root dir which contains “A diamond in the rough”. Maybe there are other phrases possible to put in the “.wake” file which can cause Tablo to do interesting things when it boots.
cd /mnt/old
sudo tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/new ; sudo tar xvf -)
Not sure exactly what you you want. There are various topic and post to move to another drive.
Basic options: clone orfirst let tablo format then copy old drive to new drive, suggest rsync, but cp/copy should be adequate.
Yes all files are owned by user root and should be copied the same. CloneZilla makes it all painless.
Yes, thank you for these clear instructions! I just upgraded my 500Gb Tablo drive to a 1Tb one. Took a minute to find the Windows download link for the software. I can verify that it works great on Windows 10. The Windows download is here. They now call it Linux File Systems for Windows, but still the same company, Paragon.
To be sure I didn’t mess up the original drive, I mounted it read-only. Then mounted the new drive Read-Write and ran the copy.
Once copy was complete, verified both drives had the same sizes, here are the results:
Posting this in case someone else finds it useful. Be sure you get those hidden files which you may not see in Windows by default.
Old drive:
0 .nuvyyo
24 .wake
21406822 db
0 del
0 lost+found
384265183580 rec
----------------------
New drive after copy. Same same. Worked great.
0 .nuvyyo
24 .wake
21406822 db
0 del
0 lost+found
384265183580 rec
-----------------------
