# Copying settings and programmes between disks



## dickp (Oct 3, 2006)

I've just bought a 250G drive upgrade from tivoheaven&#46;co&#46;uk (excellent speedy service, thanks!) so I want to copy all my settings and some programmes from the old disk onto the new.

I've been reading up on mfstools, but would like to double check that I'm not doing anything stupid before I take my Tivo apart.

Here are the commands that I think should be used:

mfsbackup -o backup_file -6 -T -a /dev/old-tivo-disk

mfsrestore -i backup_file -s 250 -x -r4 -z -p /dev/new-tivo-disk

(Incidentally, the restore instructions from Tivo Heaven that came with the disk have a second "mfsadd -x -r4" step instead of adding those options to the restore; is there a reason to do it separately rather than as part of the restore?)

I assume that that restore command will blow away the LBA48 kernel too, so I'll have to copykern as well afterwards. Is there an easier method to just copy the data across without having to wipe the target disk in the process?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Hold on a second!

If you run those Mfstools commands you will *wipe everything on the target drive* and end up with a facsimilie of your existing drive. Is that really what you want to do? 

Also, is your temporary drive big enough for a 40gb backup file?


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## dickp (Oct 3, 2006)

Yes, I can find a 40G temporary drive (or according to the Hinsdale howto, just pipe the backup into the restore.)

As for ending up with a facsimile of my old drive, I was hoping there'd be a way of just copying the old data onto the new bigger drive rather than blowing away the preconfigured drive. I posted the question in the hope that someone would show me a better way.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

I'm afraid that's the only way I know  (although if you don't mind losing your recordings you could copy just your season passes using the TiVoWeb SP backup/restore module)

I would suggest making a minimal backup of the new drive first for safety - eg. 

mfsbackup -l32 -so /mnt/dos/tivoheaven.bak /dev/new-drive

That will be about 1gb in size (no buggy compression, but can be zipped later) and will enable you to recover the drive to its as-new state if your copy goes wrong. 

Then do a piped backup-restore from old to new:-

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/old-drive | mfsrestore -s 400 -r4 -xzpi - /dev/new-drive

Then run copykern against the new drive specifying kernel option 1 to copy the LBA48 kernel and initialise the swapfile.

The separate mfsadd is not required as the -r4 works just fine as part of the restore. I have specified 400mb swap too to allow for addition of up to a 500gb "B" drive at a later stage


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## dickp (Oct 3, 2006)

The TiVoWeb SP backup/restore sounds like a good option; can it do thumbs as well?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Not sure - never used it myself 

Somebody who has will be along shortly...


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## Benedict (Jun 8, 2002)

....and here i am!  

Just looked through the output file produced by the SP backup module and I'm pretty sure it doesn't do thumbs - other than the thumbs associated with your SPs.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Got to ask; if your happy running that command, why did you buy a pre-configured drive? That command makes a regular £45 250Gb drive into a TiVo drive!


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## PhilG (Jan 15, 2002)

or you could have paid a little more extra and had the 'lemon do all that nasty copying for you........ He's done mine (many times )


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

TCM2007 said:


> a regular £45 250Gb drive


Unfortunately, the Samsung HA250JC is considerably more expensive than that, otherwise I'd have retired to the Bahamas by now


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## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

Surely HA250 is obsolete & probably not made in large quantities any more (if at all).. an HD250 would be a better choice nowadays.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Yes, they are discontinued now, but they are 4500rpm so there's considerably less heat and vibration than 'standard' 7200rpm drives


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

A hard disk is a hard disk is a hard disk these days. For every person singing the praises of a brand I'll find you a dozen slagging it off!

Not had any heat or viberation issues with 7200rpm disks myself. £45 will get you a perfectly servicable 250Gb drive.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Yes, they are discontinued now, but they are 4500rpm so there's considerably less heat and vibration than 'standard' 7200rpm drives


Speaking as one who has two of these drives in my Tivo that I installed 18 months ago I can confidently say that they are actually 5400rpm drives. Also seeing as how 4200rpm drives are the next step down from 5400rpm I think you may possible have your 4 and your 5 transposed here?

See:-

www.samsung.com/sg/products/hddodd/harddiskdrive/ha250jc.asp?page=Specifications

Also I think the heat and vibration thing is probably wearing just a little bit thin by now given how quiet and vibration free all the subsequent large Samsung HD drives have also been. If people are also going to take up your Mode 0 option blindlemon then I would have thought having 130 hours or so recording capacity at Mode 0 with VBR rather than 80 hours would be likely to a pretty relevant issue to most?

But if you do reckon the HA250JC is superior then surely sourcing it from the cheapest suppliers in Germany rather than from Ultratech at a high price would make more sense commercially? 

See www.heise.de/preisvergleich/a145199.html


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> I can confidently say that they are actually 5400rpm drives.


I think you mean 5760rpm 



Pete77 said:


> I think you may have your 4 and your 5 transposed here?


There you have me 



Pete77 said:


> I think the heat and vibration thing is probably wearing a bit thin by now


Have you actually compared an HA250JC side-by-side with any 400gb 7200rpm drives?

Don't get me wrong: the HD400LD is an excellent drive - quiet and cool-running _for a 400gb 7200rpm drive_ - but the HA250JC vibrates less and puts out a lot less heat :up:

150gb extra capacity once you have 250gb is not going to make a vast difference in day-to-day usage anyway.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> 150gb extra capacity once you have 250gb is not going to make a vast difference in day-to-day usage anyway.


Anything less than 600 hours recording capacity is always going to be inadequate for me.  

But more seriously I would have thought 130 hours vs 80 hours was a big difference for most, although I agree that 480 hours vs 300 hours would not be so significant for those who are content to record everything at Basic. Also as one who forced HP to replace their horrid Toshiba MK6025GAS 80Gb machine gun drive that shipped with my HP DV1139EA Centrino Notebook with the current Samsung MP 0804H its possible that I would notice the noise difference but most would not. My brother in law has a fan like a hairdryer in his living room desktop server that I personally find quite unbearable but he thinks nothing of.

Also why aren't you sourcing these V120CE drives from the cheapest place. VAT is not payable on shipping these goods within the EU as I understand it. Unless you still have some hangup against the Germans from the last war. 

See www.heise.de/preisvergleich/a145199.html


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Don't get me wrong: the HD400LD is an excellent drive - quiet and cool-running _for a 400gb 7200rpm drive_ - but the HA250JC vibrates less and puts out a lot less heat :up:


But I expect the HD400LD will still give most customers 3 years life or so and by then they will probably want to replace it with a one Terrabyte model, assuming of course that Tivo are still in business and still offering UK Tivo service.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Benedict said:


> Just looked through the output file produced by the SP backup module and I'm pretty sure it doesn't do thumbs - other than the thumbs associated with your SPs.


Hmmm, this is depressing news. I have thumbed a lot of series and one off programs over time into the 700+ area and always wondered why there never seemed to be as many as this mentioned by the TivoWeb backup module output screen:-



> Taking snapshot of season passes - please wait
> 
> Backup Checklist
> Copy existing backup file to '/var/hack/tivoweb-tcl/backups/settings.old'	Done
> ...


But what are the 22 channels and the 102 series talking about I wonder?

Up to now I have managed to retain all my thumbs data by doing a piped back up and restore to my current 250Gb + 250Gb setup from the original 15Gb + 30Gb. But does that mean my only option from here is to replace my A drive with another 250Gb through a DD copy but then replace my B drive with a Samsung 750Gb or 1000Gb as and when they become available? I believe partition limits mean I can't expand my A drive any further.

Why hasn't the Backup module been improved so as to Backup all thumbs data then as certainly Ljay's add on module under User Interface/Preferences can edit the thumbs value of all those many hundreds of series I have thumbed over time.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

dickp said:


> Yes, I can find a 40G temporary drive (or according to the Hinsdale howto, just pipe the backup into the restore.)
> 
> As for ending up with a facsimile of my old drive, I was hoping there'd be a way of just copying the old data onto the new bigger drive rather than blowing away the preconfigured drive. I posted the question in the hope that someone would show me a better way.


I hate to ask this but as you don't mind working out Linux commands yourself did you never come across www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo which is a great deal easier and more straightforward than the Hinsdale guide to follow? Then you could have kept all your data and created a 400Gb drive at a lower price than you have paid to Tivoheaven for a 250Gb drive....................................


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> Also why aren't you sourcing these V120CE drives from the cheapest place. VAT is not payable on shipping these goods within the EU as I understand it. Unless you still have some hangup against the Germans from the last war.
> 
> See www.heise.de/preisvergleich/a145199.html


Well, firstly I wasn't alive in the last war so I have no hangups about the Germans, but more importantly, none of those places have any stock!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Well, firstly I wasn't alive in the last war so I have no hangups about the Germans, but more importantly, none of those places have any stock!


Isn't the fact that no one else has any stock of these drives trying to tell you something though blindlemon? And surely you could negotiate a bulk purchase with Ultratec to clear their entire remaining stock at a lower price? 

There is an SATA 500Gb Samsung drive out now which surely says the 500Gb IDE version cannot be far behind?

As to the last war I was born 18 years after it finished but both my parents were between about 5/6 and 11/12 during it and I was regularly fed a large amount of anti German sentiment during my formative years. Speaking personally I would find it very hard indeed to ever purchase anything from AEG, which is merely IG Faben (of Auschwitz poison gas manufacturing fame) by another name.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Pete77 said:


> But what are the 22 channels and the 102 series talking about I wonder?


The TiVo datbase is a series of interlinked objects (Recordings, Progams, Series, Channels, etc). To correctly back up a SP, all of the objects which it refers to must be backed up too.



> Why hasn't the Backup module been improved so as to Backup all thumbs data then as certainly Ljay's add on module under User Interface/Preferences can edit the thumbs value of all those many hundreds of series I have thumbed over time.


The codes's there - go right ahead and add it if you want it. That's how these hacks work - you want a feature, you code a feature.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

TCM2007 said:


> The codes's there - go right ahead and add it if you want it. That's how these hacks work - you want a feature, you code a feature.


Where do I learn TCL though?

I did enough efforts at programming in Basic with line numbers 25 years ago to conclude that I'm not really very much good at proper programming, even though I do enjoy tinkering with the setup of PCs.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Buy this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hacking-TiV...ef=sr_1_3/026-0742917-7030011?ie=UTF8&s=books

for £7. And read lots of TiVoweb module code - the best way to learn is to pick apart what they do.

I'd also recommend:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tcl-Tk-Nuts...ef=sr_1_7/026-0742917-7030011?ie=UTF8&s=books

and

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-P...ef=sr_1_1/026-0742917-7030011?ie=UTF8&s=books

as refernces, but you don't need them; there's enough in the TiVo book and plenty of reference sites on the web.

If you can program in BASIC you can write TiVo modules; it's very straightforward. Aside from some BASIC at school my only programming is from writing VB macros for Excel. Professional programmers would no doubt be able to spot that form my code!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

IF A >= 200 THEN GOSUB 200
FOR N= 1 TO 20..... (forgot the rest)

Well may be I will give it a try but most of the good modules for TivoWeb have already been written by now.

I suspect I need to track down the original Backup thread and try and persuade its originator to expand its functionality to encompass all Thumbs data.

Via careful editing in Tivoweb's User Interface/Preferences/Explicity Thumbed module I have got my Thumbs to a state where my Suggestions recommendations while not perfect include some pretty useful recommendations and I would hate to lose all of them in a hard disk crash.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

So pull the disk and take a backup!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

TCM2007 said:


> So pull the disk and take a backup!


Does a minimal backup without any of the programs save the thumbs data too though?

Also is there no way to do this via the Cachecard and FTP rather than having to pull the drives. The desktop PC I did the upgrades on is unfortunately no longer serviceable and I would have to buy another on Ebay.

My regular PC is an HP Pavilion DV1139EA Notebook PC.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OK I have now discovered that Boygenius is the author of the Backup module and has a whole website that explains its development and seemingly why he only saves the Thumbs data for current SPs and Wishlists.

However as I have now discovered that I in fact have thumbs data for 1800 different programs, films and series but SPs and Wislists for only 150 series I have emailed BoyGenius to ask if there is no way the module could be extended to save all the rest of the Thumbs data for us true thumbing fanatics.

Here is the Boygenius website that covers the Backup module. I also found I was running the version of backup.itcl one before the latest one, although having loaded the latest version and used it not a lot seems to have actually changed:-

See www.boygenius.co.uk/tivo/faq.html


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