[mythtv] Re: New idea for storing recordings to disks

[Tony Lill]

Brandon Beattie <brandon+myth at linuxis.us> writes:

> Well it happened, one of 5 disks in my LVM setup went bad and the claims
> of every LVM user I know didn't come true (That if you lose one disk,
> you can still get to the data of the rest).  

Depends on how bad your disk went... 
1 Buy a new disk at least as big as the bad one. If you can get
exactly the same disk it's easy, but XXX Gb disks from different
manufacturers are all slightly different sizes. Best to get a bigger
one.

2 Stick the new one and the bad one in a PC and boot knoppix. 

3 re-create the partition table of the bad disk on the new disk,
making sure that all partitions are at least as big as on the bad
disk. 

4 Use dd_rescue to recover most of the data from the disk. dd_rescue
does a block by block copy, and does it's best to work around disk
errors and recover as much data as possible.

5 Stick the new disk in your mythtv in place of the bad disk, (it must
be exactly the same hdXY as the bad one) run fsck, and pray.

I've had to do this twice and kept almost all of my recordings.

>>From this I had an idea and wanted to see if it's a good idea for Myth.

Strangely enough, I've just started seriously looking into doing
that. I'll do the backend if you do the UI ;->
>
> Recordings would work like this.  Just like in various mythplugins you
> would be able to specify various locations to store recordings to.  This
> wouldn't be hard of course.. if that directory doesn't have enough
> space, use another directory. If no directories exist, expire a file
> from the directory with the most amount of space in it.  Of course there
> could be different ways to expire, move files, to balance used space..
>
> Comments?
>
> The reason I truely like this idea is it takes a lot of complexity out
> of the picture.  No longer do you need LVM, Raid, or even need to have
> things setup for one directory to store recordings..  Just tell it where
> to use space from and it will save recordings to whereever it can.
>
> This would also be helpful for adding/removing disks and so on.  Another
> feature that would be helpful is when selecting a recording in the
> watch-recordings, is to specify which disk it should reside on.. so
> maybe store shows you care about to a specific disk (maybe it's raided
> or something) and kids shows you don't care about would be stored to an
> old disk that may go out at any time..  You could also move files,
> reformat disks, repartition, and so on without having to kill your
> entire recorded shows.

Don't forget archiving to CD/DVD
--
Tony Lill,                         Tony.Lill at AJLC.Waterloo.ON.CA
President, A. J. Lill Consultants        fax/data (519) 650 3571
539 Grand Valley Dr., Cambridge, Ont. N3H 2S2     (519) 241 2461
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