[mythtv-users] removable storage questions

[James Miller]

Hello all. I'm running a little low on disk space on my Mythtv (Mythbuntu) 
box and so am thinking of ways to address the problem. I have a few 
"smaller" (by Mythtv standards, anyway) hard drives, 40-100GB in size, and 
am considering whether I might offload, for longer-term storage, of some 
recordings I plan to keep. There's not room inside the box for adding more 
drives, by the way, so for now I'm sort of limited to using these as 
external storage hooked (via an adapter) to USB. So I'm talking in 
principle about removable or even hotplugged storage. I did some searching 
on the web and in the wiki but did not manage yet to find information 
addressing the scenarios I envision. Thus the current post.

I have some experience with adding directories as storage groups, which 
might be the simplest option--if hot-swappable drives can be utilized in 
this fashion. As I understand it, the way to employ that sort of solution 
would be to add the mount point for the external drive as a storage group 
directory, then just transfer over recordings to it. I hope what I'm 
describing makes some sense.

But I question whether that sort of simple approach will work. The 
potential problem, as I foresee it, is that the said drives are not always 
going to be hooked to my Myth box. To economize and extend the lives of 
the disks, they should be powered off, except when some recording needs to 
be retrieved. I don't understand terribly well the technical details of 
how the Mythtv system works, but for now I'm assuming that adding a 
directory that is not always present as a storage group could wreak havoc 
with Myth's database. Am I correct in that assumption? Or can the database 
deal with disappearing/re-appearing directories?

If I'm correct that this simple solution may not be feasible, can anyone 
offer alternate ways of incorporating the external drives I've described 
into my Myth box? I know how to transcode my recordings, then manually 
move them over to a removable drive. But I'm wondering whether there isn't 
a way to incorporate the drives as long-term storage that won't involve 
all those extra steps.

Input will be appreciated.

Thanks,
James