[mythtv-users] automating storage moves

aaron memoryguy at gmail.com
Tue Feb 9 19:44:16 UTC 2010


On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 14:29, Brian Frost <bfrost at brainboy.com> wrote:
> I have a large 2T backend and (potentially) a small 160GB backend. I would
> love to use the small backend to record because it is close to where I have
> the tuner physically. Is there a way to automate migration from the storage
> group on the smaller BE to the storage group on the larger BE? I might just
> NFS mount up a dir on the larger BE but a storage migration from cron (or
> similiar facility) would be great.
>
> advice?

I'm doing something like this to migrate recordings from my internal
IDE drive ("Default" storage group) to one of my three 1 TB USB drives
("External" storage group).

I'm using a small C program which periodically looks into a database
table (the "copy queue") and then slowly copies the recording
(rate-limited to 4 MB/s to try to reduce IO bandwidth contention). I
use a small user job (shell script) to insert the recording details
into the queue when the recording finishes.

Works well for me... except that any space-driven auto-expiring won't
work... as far as I can tell... since the backend doesn't know that
the recording is going to be moved (it doesn't know it should delete
from "External" rather than "Default"). So far it hasn't been a big
issue for me; I manually make sure I have enough room.

No, it's probably not an ideal solution, but it works well for me, and
gets around my issue with the USB hanging periodically... when I
record directly to the USB drive, it sometimes "hangs" for 15--20
seconds, and I end up with a dropped segment in the recording. I'm not
sure what the cause is/was but this setup seems to avoid the issue for
me.

I would *much* rather add internal drives, for a variety of reasons,
but it's pretty much impossible to find IDE (yes, IDE :) ) drives
bigger than 500 GB and I don't have enough drive bays to make that
worthwhile. Upgrading the system will entail replacing pretty much
everything since the machine is obsolete... (it's only 5.5 years
old... ;-) )

aaron


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