[mythtv-users] offloading recordings onto another machine

[Brian Wood]

On Nov 15, 2006, at 6:59 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:

> On 11/15/2006 04:58 AM, Brian Wood wrote:
>> On Nov 15, 2006, at 2:38 AM, Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Now that I'm successfully making recordings, I am recording more
>>> than I'm
>>> watching, and running out of drive space. I have lots of space on
>>> another
>>> machine, and was looking at MythArchive to see how I can use it but
>>> I'm
>>> not sure it will do what I want. What I want is a way to "export"
>>> recordings off to another machine (via a Samba share), and then  
>>> when I
>>> want to watch them, "import" them back to Myth. I don't want to
>>> create a
>>> DVD, just get the files out of my Recordings directory. If I can do
>>> this
>>> from the command-line I can even automate the process. Is there a
>>> tutorial
>>> somewhere?
>>>
>>
>>
>> You could use myth_archive_job.pl to move files off onto just about
>> anyplace. I'd suggest nfs and not samba as some samba implementations
>> have 2GB file size limitations.
>>
>> I use it to move files to a USB drive, but I see no reason why a
>> network-mounted filesystem wouldn't work. Assuming your network is
>> fast enough you wouldn't even have to move them back in order to
>> watch them.
>
> BTW, myth_archive_job.pl (which is unrelated to MythArchive) does
> exactly what Robin suggested with symlinks, but does it all for you.
> So, both of these suggestions (received 3 min apart) were the same and
> you really should look into myth_archive_job.pl even if you wrote  
> it off
> before as "the more complicated solution."
>

Absolutely correct, the script simply automates moving the file and  
creating a symlink. It will also check for room in the directory  
before it moves a file and can check multiple directories for space  
available before it does so. All in all a very nice  piece of work.

One thing to be aware of though, at least with my older version of  
0.19, is that if you run a transcode job on a file which has been  
moved the new file will be created in the original directory, over- 
writing the symlink and leaving the moved file just hanging.

I get around this by simply always transcoding before moving files,  
but it is something to be aware of. This may well have been addressed  
in later versions but I'm not sure.

You also want to make sure that "follow symlinks" is checked in your  
setup so the system will delete the actual file and not just the link  
that points to it if you decide to delete a file.