Adding a hard drive

[dk4175]

New user and added a hard drive for a total of three drives. Will Sage program allow manual balancing of recorded files across drives? Should program be shut down, files balanced and program restarted or is there another requirement?

Thanks in advance - could not find this info in the manual or on the forum. DK

[JetreL]

SageTV does it's own load balancing. Basically the process it uses is to fill up the least full drive till they are all in sync of space available or meets your space free requirements that you set when you add the drive. It's pretty basic but works really well in most situations. You can move files around and balance yourself but the sage method auto-corrects fairly well. (Make sure you formatted to 64k blocks) To move files around do a search for "moving recording directory" there should be a sticky that explains the process.

[JetreL]

Welcome!!! Btw!!!

[dk4175]

Thanks for the welcome.

I realize I should have added information. I have two 1.5 tb drives with about 1.0 tb on each. They are backed up weekly to two 1.5 tb drives using Acronis True Image. I added a 2.0 tb drive for more space and a 2.0 tb drive for back up to ease problems with Acronis True Image saying the back up drives are full(still learning the Acronis interface and options).

I found the balancing info for future writing but wanted to balance the existing data so that all new recordings did not go to the new drive. I was worried the manual balancing would cause problems with the data that the Sage program keeps.

Thanks again. DK

[JetreL]

To move files around do a search for "moving recording directory" there should be a sticky that explains the process.

Link

This should not have any adverse affects if you do it right. I have done it 5 or 6 times when rebuilding my configuration to work for what I need. The key to tell Sage to adjust it's pointers is:

edit the Sage.properties file to:
advanced_video_file_recovery=true

[dk4175]

Thanks, Jetrel. I was looking under hardware for the answer and did not think about software. Appreciate the help. Finding the location of the answer is sometimes harder than finding the answer.

Once again thanks for your help. DK

[davephan]

Originally Posted by dk4175

Thanks for the welcome.

I realize I should have added information. I have two 1.5 tb drives with about 1.0 tb on each. They are backed up weekly to two 1.5 tb drives using Acronis True Image. I added a 2.0 tb drive for more space and a 2.0 tb drive for back up to ease problems with Acronis True Image saying the back up drives are full(still learning the Acronis interface and options).

I found the balancing info for future writing but wanted to balance the existing data so that all new recordings did not go to the new drive. I was worried the manual balancing would cause problems with the data that the Sage program keeps.

Thanks again. DK

Which drive(s) are you backing up with Acronis? I only backup my C drive with both Acronis and Ghost. I keep the number of files on my C drive to a minimum to reduce the image size, the C drive is not partitioned and used only for the operating system and program files.

I don't think backing up all the video files with Acronis is a good idea, if that is what you are doing. Regular images of your C drive is a good idea. The C drive image files can be saved to one of your video drives. The image files then can be copied to at least one other drive using Synctoy or some other copying utility.

If you want to have redundancy for your video files, then you could use a file copying program for those too. Since there may be too many video files, and the video files are so large, I think file copying is not a very effective solution to protect the video files. You might be better suited to protect the video files with RAID, unRAID, or maybe WHS. Or, maybe you could protect the 'critical' video files with drive copying and not protect most of the video files.

I protect my video files with RAID 1 drive pairs. My critical video files are also copied onto a separate RAID 1 drive pair and a storage drive on another computer.

The reason to use Acronis, or any other imaging program is so that you can recover your boot/programs drive back to the past when your system was working perfectly, should you encounter problems. I think its going to be a loosing battle to try to protect the video files with imaging, if that is what you're trying to do.

Dave