fedora for storage

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

For some reason, I can't seem to get over the fear of separate non fault-tolerant drives recording shows for me. I stick with a mirror nowadays vs. my RAID5. I think it's because the WAF is so easily destroyed when a show is not available right away etc...

I think this is something FlexRAID works well on. You can, for instance, protect only certain files or folders... You could, in that case, still run with separate drives, with parity protection on your 'critical' folder. Have the critical folder set up as an import folder in sage, and use something like SJQ to automatically move all your WAF sensitive recordings to the critical folder. Sage will still see them as full recordings, but the files themselves will have parity protection across your drives. No loss of read/write performance, but still have the important stuff rapidly recoverable.

[korben_dallas]

Are Import directories truly equal to Recording directories?

I am not necessarily opposed to recording locally and then batch copying. I see some issues with it, but there will always be compromises I suppose.

[davephan]

I will add one more for unRAID. It's a good solution for your long term stored recording library (import directories) videos or to back up videos that you want more data protection. UnRAID is not a good solution for direct recording, since the write speed is slow. You can setup an unRAID cache drive, which makes it faster, and eventually a scheduled job writes the data to the unRAID storage drives.

UnRAID gives you the ability to keep adding more drives as long as the case and power supply supports them. My unRAID is 16 TB and it is almost full most of the time. It's harder to clean out since there are so many files. Once you get past a few TB, you probably will never have the time to watch more than a tiny fraction of the stored files. Most of the files will never be watched.

UnRAID just runs and runs. It never needs to be patched or rebooted, it is very reliable, but very slow to write.

I recommend you use SyncBack, which is free to move the files from your recording drives to the unRAID drives. You could very quickly manually move the files from the SageTV recording directory to another directory on the SageTV server. Then let the SyncBack job move them to the unRAID server. Another method would be to automatically move the files to the unRAID server with DirMon2. I keep most but not all of my recording library on the unRAID server and all of the recording directories on the SageTV computer. You can try unRAID for free. If you don't need a lot of unRAID storage and the 3 drive version meets your needs, there's no cost. The free unRAID version does not timeout. If you need more storage, you can buy the medium or large version, both are relatively low cost.

Dave

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

Are Import directories truly equal to Recording directories?

I am not necessarily opposed to recording locally and then batch copying. I see some issues with it, but there will always be compromises I suppose.

Yes, as far as sage is concerned, import directories are the same as recording directories. The only difference is it won't record to an import directory. You can move recordings into import directories, and as long as sage still recognizes it (meaning it either has the v7+ embedded metadata, or still has the ID in the filename), it will still treat it as a recording. Conversely, you can add new/unknown files to a recording directory, and it will import them into your video library.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I think this is something FlexRAID works well on. You can, for instance, protect only certain files or folders... You could, in that case, still run with separate drives, with parity protection on your 'critical' folder. Have the critical folder set up as an import folder in sage, and use something like SJQ to automatically move all your WAF sensitive recordings to the critical folder. Sage will still see them as full recordings, but the files themselves will have parity protection across your drives. No loss of read/write performance, but still have the important stuff rapidly recoverable.

True, I forgot about that software for a bit. Has Flexraid gone realtime yet? I saw 2.0 was out, but haven't played with it since the 1.x days. How is performance if you are calculating parity on a SageTV server?

[Fuzzy]

His 'real-time' is in beta, though honestly, for something like recordings and imports, snapshot should be enough for most people. No performance hit at all for snapshot mode, as it runs at low priority, and can be scheduled for off-hours.

[FlyingShawn]

Has anyone tried using Amahi/Greyhole in a VM for storage? I'm specifically looking at Amahi (which is Fedora-based and has Greyhole built-in), but I'm open to suggestions.

I'm building a new Sage server (Actually, my first, I was just beginning the switching process from BTV when the Google-pocalypse happened. The new server got pushed to the back-burner by life and some other projects and I'm just now able to get back to it) based on an i5-2500k box running Win 7 with two Colossus cards and an HDHR Dual.

I'm planning on this machine also serving as the main backup server for the rest of my network (since it'll be always-on), so I need redundancy for things like documents, pictures, system backups, etc. Obviously, I don't need that redundancy for my Sage recordings, so most RAID-based solutions would just waste space.

The attraction of Greyhole is that the redundancy is flexible on a share-level, so I can have it keep documents backed up on every drive, but not have any redundancy for Sage (and everything in between). The other advantage is that it doesn't do any striping/proprietary drive formatting, so if something happens to the VM the drive is readable on other systems.

My plan is to have Sage record to a local Win7 drive (WD Caviar Black) and then move files over to the VM (likely using SJQ) after running some operations on them (likely ComSkip, creating WMV copies for my Zune, and converting the HDHR recordings to MP4 to save space, if I can figure out how to program all that).

Any thoughts? I know Fedora wasn't getting much love earlier in the thread (which Amahi is based on), but I haven't found anything else that has the redundancy flexibility I'm looking for.