Finally was able to get my hands on a 4-tuner Gen4. Had started with the 2-tuner but going to give that to my son. I have a few recordings on my 3TB external hard drive but not too many. I plugged the drive in to the 4-tuner Gen4 and it immediately was recognized but it shows only 2.7tb of 3.0tb available (300gb used), but none of the recordings are in the library.
1.) Is it possible at all to bring over these previous 2-tuner gen4 recordings?
2.) Assuming the above is not possible, how do I reformat the drive now that its hooked up to the 4-tuner gen4? I don’t see any option in the settings to re-format the drive…(Do I need to take it to a PC and remove the partitions before bringing back to the 4-tuner gen4 and then it will prompt me to re-format it?)
1: No, your recordings will not work on another Tablo, 4th gen or other. Once you have removed the external drive and rebooted the system, even the first Tablo will no longer recognize those recordings.
2: The easiest way is to is to reformat on a computer and then have the Tablo reformat it for the new device.
Bonus: If you have a linux machine you can keep those recordings but you’ll have to sort them out on your own. They will be in multiple segments (up to 600+ per HD hour) but you will be able to copy them over to merge or play from a playlist. There is no identifying information as to what the recordings are, but some information might be held an the m3u8 files that I, personally, have no idea how to make use of. While a painstaking process, it is doable. (I apologize if this was too much to go into.)
OK this is what I expected, thanks for confirming. I’ll quickly move it to a PC, format it, then move it back and let tablo format it again. Would be nice if there was a way to backup/restore your recordings if needed in the future or migrate the drive from one tablo gen4 to another (ex: what if the tablo were to die and need to be replaced? in that case you always would lose all your recordings? sad face)
I certainly agree. I’ve been through three external drives on one, but I’m happy with how things have turned out once I got the right drive in them both…
(I started with two 2-tuners, bought a 4-tuner, sold one of the others to my mom. Don’t worry., she only had to buy me lunch!)
I saw Tablo previously responded with ‘It’s not possible to move drives on the 4th gen yet.’ in a response in December. Hopefully ‘yet’ means that it’s on their to do list since I’m planning on upgrading to the 4-tuner eventually.
Thanks for the link to this thread, can’t believe I missed it before I posted my question. I ended up moving my drive to a PC, reformatting my drive on that PC, then moving it back to Tablo and reformatting it yet again. I lost all my recordings but at least I got full use of the drive capacity now.