Just thought I’d ask. My 2nd 1.5TB drive is over half-full. PLEX is waiting for TV content to be added. Other capture devices are making PLEX part of their built-in apps. If this isn’t already being worked on, some better take a serious look at this gaping hole, other venders sure are doing there best to make sure their devices play well with PLEX. The 2nd party PLEX plug-in does not address content backup, so you Tablo, have the prime opportunity here to kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
I agree Tablo needs to make this a priority.
Nothing official yet, but the most simple solution so far is Jestep’s Tablo Exporter:
https://community.tablotv.com/t/tablo-exporter
2nd 1.5 TB drive is now full and deleting recordings on it’s own. Is there any chance of a backup option update from Tablo coming soon? I know I’m not alone here. It would be really nice to select check boxes for individual, series, other filters and press a button and have the files backed up to another network location. Maybe you could make this into a multiple choice option to ether delete/backup/protect recordings on those with boxes checked. Sure seems like it would be something Tablo would want as it certainly would make it a better product.
I hope by the end of the calendar year? It is already June so I wouldn’t expect it any sooner.
Fire TV stuttering bugs and Roku rebooting bugs need to be fixed before new features as this is implemented.
The Roku preview app also needs to be made the same as all the other platforms prior to new features. Then the original Roku app will be replaced by the new version.
Agreed. But I am not even talking feature parity. I am talking about fixing playback so it is bugless.
I’d have to say backing up takes precedence for me by a long shot. I’d rather have a bit of trouble playing something back, than completely losing something to play back. I can’t wait another half-year and I can’t backup with any of the tools without spending way more time then I have to do this. That leaves me with buying a 3rd drive to taking drive offline long enough to back it up using linux. That’s a few hours. My 1st drive was not compatible, so had to buy the 2nd for this Tablo. Really don’t want to buy a 3dr, but it would be the easiest solution with mostly no impact on downtime. Suppose I have to order another one.
You will likely have to wait. I don’t think the average user fills up a 1.5 TB or 2 TB drive in 6 months.
I just watch and then delete. I do have the Tablo set up to automatically delete if space is needed. I wish it was easier to delete. For example, I only want to keep the last 2 or 3 days of the evening newscast. If I don’t watch it, i don’t watch it…no big deal.
I am building a TV library for my PLEX server – Or should I say, “I will” once I have a realistic method to move content to my PLEX server. My preference is to have a whole series (or just about) recorded and then watch it. I like to watch a number of the same series at a time and a whole series in a couple 3 evenings. Some I won’t even get to for a long time and some I will want to go back to after some length of time and re-watch if they were good enough. I will have to download the missing episodes, and I really don’t want to do much of that. This is what I bought this Tablo for – Explicitly. Never gave a thought to it not being able to save content to another drive/server. Big surprise to find it didn’t do this. This is what I have been doing limitedly for a few years now using my 2-tuner card. Wanted more content faster, so bought the Tablo.
Ordering another WD Elements 1.5TB from newegg now at $70.
I agree it is a much needed feature.
However, there is no other device out there as of today that can do what the Tablo can do. As long as they add this feature before the launch of the new HDHomeRun they will be golden. Which the launch will be months away, they just finished their crowd funding campaign.
I am just curious why you would ever think that?
Have had a number of capture card of all types TV, MPEG, AVI even B/W capture card back in the early 90’s. All have had a pathway to saving content. The only ones I have ever used without it, were with Comcast and satellite companies. Guess I should have given more thought or research, but the last few devices I bought were USB/PCI devices and they allowed copying fine.
Yes, all these devices you speak of required a standalone computer to work. The Tablo is not such a device, it is a network DVR, not a computer. No other standalone DVR which is NOT a computer can currently do what you want in terms of offline backup.
3rd hard drive installed today. Is there any forecast if and when a backup system will become available from Tablo Support? Won’t be buying any more hard drives, so I do hope a factory backup system will be coming soon.
-Rodger
@marjamar, does the Tablo seem to handle swapping between hard drives pretty well? Do the schedules stay intact?
I wanted to do a test by changing out a hard drive, but I wanted to make sure I can go back to my main hard drive with no other setup.
Thanks.
Haven’t had a problem swapping and keeping everything intact. Had problems not initializing with letting my 1st drive get too full, so the next and this new drive I have auto delete enabled to avoid that problem. Might just have been a fluke with the first drive having a problem, but it was nearly full and the drive I just replace still had about 50 gigs left on it without any problems. New drive came up fine after format and kept all recording schedules intact.
-Rodger
Can you go back to the old drive if you want to watch old recordings? Or once you initialize the new drive the old drive is inaccessible?
I’ve not tried that, so can’t say for sure. I hope it works though, otherwise Tablo’s backup software to-be is going to have a problem with me.
-Rodger
In the first reply to your thread @theuser86 mentioned that you could try out @Jestep tablo exporter to backup content off of your tablo. I’m curious if you have checked it out at all.
I have used it a couple of times and it’s very user friendly. You can now even change the quality of the episode depending on your preference. It’s pretty neat and I highly recommend checking it out.