[mythtv] Multiple recording directories

[Paul Greidanus]

Mark Edwards wrote:

>>I was thinking along these lines before Christmas when I 
>>wanted to temporarily add an extra disk for Christmas films 
>>to my server.
>>I added a bit of code to Myth to allow me to do this, a bit of a hack.
>>
>>This added the Global preference: "VideoDirs" beneath the 
>>"RecordFilePrefix" option. This took a ":" separated list of dirs.
>>This only worked for playback and you had to manually copy 
>>files to these dirs. Also the expire system did not work here.
>>
>>Some issues:
>>1. Would one directory be the master where files videos are stored
>>	and the other ones extra ones or should all dirs be
>>	equally used wherever space is available ?
>>2. If the directories are considered "extra" dirs MythTv
>>	could move all videos that are not marked to expire to these
>>	directories in the background automatically.
>>
>>It didn't look like to much work to add although there were 
>>quite a few places whene "RecordFilePrefix" was used.
>>    
>>
>
>I've been considering this recently too but had thought of a different
>approach.
>I was thinking about extending the recording groups functionality to allow
>you to specify that a certain recording group would record to a certain
>directory.
>
>Then I could have a recording group for members of the family with their own
>recording group and their own disk-space which they could manage themselves.
>(to an extent!)
>
>It's a step further towards having multi-user functionality which I think
>would be a v. useful feature
>
>Mark
>
>  
>
Sounds like a lot of people have been thinking of multiple disks for a 
while.  I had some thoughts on it a few days ago, from a hack standpoint 
more then doing it right..  The multi-user thing is something that I'm 
also very interested in getting working.

But, my idea for extra video disks:
Write up a script, probably Bash, that has a record of which disks are 
to be used for secondary video storage (/video1, /video2, /video3).  It 
checks for real files in /video, and after making sure they're not still 
being recorded, moves them to one of the video disks, based on available 
space on the secondary disks, and then makes a symlink in the /video 
disk for the recording.  Then just run this script every few hours, 
every day, or whenever.

Alternately, LVM might be a much better solution, but then you get 
problems like loss of all the data on a single disk failure...