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Dvr Backup And Restore Software for Windows (DvrBARS)

403K views 2K replies 435 participants last post by  ggieseke 
#1 · (Edited)
2013/04/14: Version 1.0.0.2 Patched for DeviceIoControl error reading SD cards.
2013/04/15: Version 1.0.0.3 Patched for yet another DeviceIoControl error during restore on some computers.
2014/11/27: Version 1.0.0.6 Added the ability to restore VHD images that it doesn't recognize.
2017/11/09: Version 1.0.0.7 patched for SquashFS partitions.

**WARNING**

1. This software is provided "as is" with absolutely no warranty of any kind.
2. Opening your TiVo will void the manufacturer's warranty.
3. While every effort has been made to prevent data loss, the ultimate responsibility is yours.

OVERVIEW:

This is a Windows program designed to backup and restore TiVo DVRs. It will run on XP or later, and it should work on anything from a Series 1 to a Premiere. It is not intended as a recovery tool for corrupt or failing drives, and it will not expand or "supersize" your drive (yet).

THE BASICS:

1. Download DvrBARS and unzip it to somewhere on your drive.
2. Connect a TiVo drive to your computer. USB adapters will work, but are generally much slower than a SATA or PATA direct connection.
3. Read step 2 again. DvrBARS only scans the drives once when it first starts up. If you add, remove or change your drive configuration while it's running you will confuse the poor thing. I also strongly recommend that you do not run Windows Disk Manager while a TiVo drive is connected, because it will try to "initialize" it, which will damage the boot sector.
4. Run DvrBARS with an account that's a member of the Administrators group or right-click it and choose Run as Administrator.
5. If you like it and want to help support future development, find the donate option in the System Information screen.

NOW WHAT?

There are three backup options (Full, Modified Full, and Truncated).

Full is perfect if you have a drive that's straight from the factory because most of the drive is all zeroes. A Full backup "xeroxes" the entire drive, but due to the way dynamic VHD files work you'll get a byte-for-byte copy of the entire drive in a relatively small file. For Premieres that's usually about 2.5GB and you can zip it down even further.

Modified Full backups selectively copy all of the sectors that are in use, including your recordings. You'll need a lot of disk space if you have a lot of recordings.

Truncated backups are like Modified backups, but your recordings are excluded. The final backup file will be about the same size as a Full backup of a factory drive that has never been booted, especially if you exclude the alternate Root partition (see the Settings screen).

All three backup methods will preserve your settings, CableCARD pairing, Season Passes, guide data etc.

There are two restore options (Full and Quick).

Full restores write all of the information in the backup image to the target drive, including the sectors that weren't backed up. They get zeroes.

Quick restores only write the sectors that contain data. The rest of the target drive is untouched.

NOTES:

There's a roughly 2.2TB limit inherent in the VHD file format. If you try to do a Full backup of a 2TB drive that has been in use for a while it will probably run for about 10 hours and die.

You cannot make a Modified or Truncated backup of a dual drive TiVo unless both drives are connected. It has to be able to scan the entire MFS file system to figure out what sectors to include.

For adventurous souls, you can use the VHD files with VMWare or Windows Virtual PC. Use the VHD as the source drive, boot the virtual computer with the mfstools or jmfs ISO file and you can expand, supersize, etc to another drive.

If you have Vista or later you can also mount a VHD file in Disk Manager and use it as the source drive for further operations like turning a Full or Modified backup into a Truncated backup, but be careful to check the Read Only box.

PLEASE HELP!!!!

I have a perfect image of a TCD748000 Premiere XL straight from the factory. I also have a nearly pristine TCD746320 Premiere image, but it's larger because it came from a drive that had already been through one upgrade. If you have a "virgin" drive laying around somewhere, run a full backup and send me a PM. Someday I hope to have clean images of every recent model available to the community.

Donate if you can. An awful lot of time and money has gone into this project so far, and the 100GB Dropbox account I set up for the images wasn't free either.

KUDOS:

Two members here (retiredqwest and jmbach) deserve a LOT of thanks and a big chunk of the credit. Their support and patience made it possible.

The pioneers who developed mfstools and jmfs also have my deepest thanks. DvrBARS is an entirely new work, but the basic knowledge of the MFS file system came from them.

AND FINALLY:

I'll shut up now. If you have any problems (and there are bound to be some) post the details here.

Enjoy!
Greg
 

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#552 ·
It does seem a little early for later model S4 drives to be failing and I wonder if a lot of it isn't the TiVo software on them getting scrambled, which we all know is by no means impossible.
That does happen, which is why I am suspicious about the reports.

The TiVo Service induced "Random Reboots" had people shopping for drives, just assuming their drive was failing, without stating they had made any efforts to test their drives.

OTOH, the "update borked my drive" issues of earlier times often was the result of the alternate partition becoming the active partition, and revealing there were bad sectors there, once pulled for testing with the mfg diags.

I guess it's getting to the point where some would rather buy a replacement drive, than invest the time and effort into testing the one they have, for whatever reasons. If that's what they want, we can't force them to do otherwise...

The Roamio doesn't use the same alternating partition scheme, AFAICT. But, those aren't the ones I'm seeing so many requests for here. It's the 748's that seem to be "dropping like flies"...
 
#554 ·
Has there been any progress for support of the newer Roamio drive backup yet?
I'm working on a drive to drive copy/expansion program, but a backup to image program for Roamios isn't on my radar at all. DvrBARS can't handle anything over 2TB even with additional code to read the new headers.

You can back up your SPs and channel selections with kmttg, and disaster recovery on a Roamio is as easy as plugging in a new blank drive.
 
#555 ·
I'm showing 57 downloads on the 748 image since I posted it a year ago. The 746 image is at 108 for comparison. Requests do seem to have spiked a bit lately but I don't know if it's hardware related. Most of them are just people stuck in boot loop hell.
And if everyone who got an image from you donated a dollar you would have enough money to pay another year of storage.
 
#557 ·
Thank you so very much for the 748000 image Greg. I bought a EURX hard drive off of Amazon and used DvrBARS to restore that image.

The problems initially began when the Tivo would just freeze while watching recorded programs, it would eventually 'unstick' and continue. Then one day we lost power and when the tivo started to boot back up it just froze at the "Welcome, Starting Up" screen. When I pulled the hard drive and attached it to my computer it came up with a bad SMART monitoring message and my attempt at backing up the drive resulted in over 500 write errors due to the disk failure.

I am disappointed, but not surprised that Tivo does not offer a disk image. Hard drive failures are a reasonablely common occurrence. Any company that sells a ~$300.00 device plus a ~$499.99 lifetime activation should support that product to the best of their ability for what could be considered a 'lifetime'. Thankfully this community provides support that prevented me from having another very expensive paperweight.
 
#558 ·
Thank you so very much for the 748000 image Greg. I bought a EURX hard drive off of Amazon and used DvrBARS to restore that image.

The problems initially began when the Tivo would just freeze while watching recorded programs, it would eventually 'unstick' and continue. Then one day we lost power and when the tivo started to boot back up it just froze at the "Welcome, Starting Up" screen. When I pulled the hard drive and attached it to my computer it came up with a bad SMART monitoring message and my attempt at backing up the drive resulted in over 500 write errors due to the disk failure.

I am disappointed, but not surprised that Tivo does not offer a disk image. Hard drive failures are a reasonablely common occurrence. Any company that sells a ~$300.00 device plus a ~$499.99 lifetime activation should support that product to the best of their ability for what could be considered a 'lifetime'. Thankfully this community provides support that prevented me from having another very expensive paperweight.
They have never provided images, but the new Roamios will rebuild from scratch given a 3TB or less blank drive. That's pretty cool, and the fact that they turn a mostly blind eye to 3rd-party software is great.

I'm glad it worked out.
 
#559 ·
I am disappointed, but not surprised that Tivo does not offer a disk image. Hard drive failures are a reasonablely common occurrence. Any company that sells a ~$300.00 device plus a ~$499.99 lifetime activation should support that product to the best of their ability for what could be considered a 'lifetime'. Thankfully this community provides support that prevented me from having another very expensive paperweight.
At least they are not currently actively pursuing people who provide such images and making them remove them.
 
#560 ·
At least they are not currently actively pursuing people who provide such images and making them remove them.
That's true. The FTP site that used to host a cache of them was always being shut-down, as well as the moderators here frowning-upon members publicly helping other members by posting links outside of PMs.

I always figured the forum sponsors were behind most of it. But, TiVo could have been a force behind the FTP site shutdowns. I still have a drive somewhere, containing everything that was on that site.

Full-disclosure: The FTP site had the "Instant Cake" iso on it. So, it still might have not been TiVo.

I'm also very happy that TiVo hasn't been going after image-sharing, and 3rd-party utility distros. I keep hearing WK, and others, have some sort of agreement with TiVo. The original home of Instant Cake advertised they did. We have no proof of it, that I'm aware of...
 
#561 ·
I'm working on a drive to drive copy/expansion program, but a backup to image program for Roamios isn't on my radar at all. DvrBARS can't handle anything over 2TB even with additional code to read the new headers.

You can back up your SPs and channel selections with kmttg, and disaster recovery on a Roamio is as easy as plugging in a new blank drive.
Replacing the drive yes however the problem though is the protected content, as for example the HBO etc which that isn't a big deal as typically they re-run the same movies over and over but if you purchase a HD movie off Amazon which is tied to the box, if you lose the drive, you lose the purchase (Gravity HD I paid $20 bucks for!). I doubt Amazon will refund my money or offer an additional download ability in say, two years from now should my Roamio drive go bad which it will eventually since no hard drive last forever.

I would PAY to have a utility that would back up my Roamio drive as I suspect others might too if reasonable priced. I can understand the issue would be to properly enforce the copyright protection as I can see it possible for some one to distribute a image that contains a series of desirable HD movies.....
 
#562 ·
Replacing the drive yes however the problem though is the protected content, as for example the HBO etc which that isn't a big deal as typically they re-run the same movies over and over but if you purchase a HD movie off Amazon which is tied to the box, if you lose the drive, you lose the purchase (Gravity HD I paid $20 bucks for!). I doubt Amazon will refund my money or offer an additional download ability in say, two years from now should my Roamio drive go bad which it will eventually since no hard drive last forever.

I would PAY to have a utility that would back up my Roamio drive as I suspect others might too if reasonable priced. I can understand the issue would be to properly enforce the copyright protection as I can see it possible for some one to distribute a image that contains a series of desirable HD movies.....
Content protection isn't really an issue since all the recordings are encrypted and will only play on that TiVo. I just don't know how many people would dedicate 3 or 4 TB and pull the drive just to back up their content.

I'll keep it in mind.
 
#563 ·
Replacing the drive yes however the problem though is the protected content, as for example the HBO etc which that isn't a big deal as typically they re-run the same movies over and over but if you purchase a HD movie off Amazon which is tied to the box, if you lose the drive, you lose the purchase (Gravity HD I paid $20 bucks for!). I doubt Amazon will refund my money or offer an additional download ability in say, two years from now should my Roamio drive go bad which it will eventually since no hard drive last forever.
Amazon digital purchases aren't tied to the TiVo you "purchased" it on. I can go to my Video Library on Amazon and download purchases to any of our 3 TiVo's (I think someone has mentioned that you can have it on up to 2 at the same time although I noticed that a number of mine indicate 4 download licenses available now).

Where did you get the idea that it was limited to that one device?

Scott
 
#564 ·
Amazon digital purchases aren't tied to the TiVo you "purchased" it on. I can go to my Video Library on Amazon and download purchases to any of our 3 TiVo's (I think someone has mentioned that you can have it on up to 2 at the same time although I noticed that a number of mine indicate 4 download licenses available now).

Where did you get the idea that it was limited to that one device?

Scott
You are limited to x number of downloads per what ever is set for a particular content, for example purchased Gravity HD and Amazon allowed 2 downloads. I downloaded once to my Tivo and the other to my PC (which wasn't HD but still counts) and now I have no further option to download Gravity anywere else.

Should my Tivo hard drive go bad, I will no longer have it as one of the downloads was used when it was transferred to one of my TiVo's.

I have all my Tivo registered at Amazon and can have purchases transfered to any of them however they don't allow you to transfer to all of them or allow that content to be transfered to another Tivo on your account once it's downloaded from Amazon. Now I guess as in my example of Gravity, I could have used my 2 downloads to 2 of my TiVo's which would have allowed a better chance of surviving a individual hard drive failure.

In retrospect, I should have just purchased the Blu-ray disk and ripped in order to archive the content, I understand the copyright issues esp with rental content but there needs to be a better provision for maintaining content when you purchase the full digital version.
 
#565 ·
You are limited to x number of downloads per what ever is set for a particular content, for example purchased Gravity HD and Amazon allowed 2 downloads. I downloaded once to my Tivo and the other to my PC (which wasn't HD but still counts) and now I have no further option to download Gravity anywere else.
I don't have a lot of Amazon digital content as I've used it only occasionally to pick up missed TV episodes. Odd that the older Big Bang Theory episode that I did recently still shows all download licenses as available but I did check one that was a few years old and it does only show 1 download available. I was basing my statement on the latest example I had where all the licenses were showing available after we had watched and deleted the episode and the following from Amazon's website.

Amazon Instant Video stores your purchased videos in Your Video Library for re-download so your videos don't have to take up space on your TiVo DVR

Scott
 
#567 ·
I have a series 2 with 2 upgraded 250gb drives in it, the drives are dying so i went to go back it up. It made me select "full" option since it detected both drives. The image it backed up is only 240gb, did it only backup one drive? or is this normal? i didnt see a way to select both drives to backup at once, i just selected the main one.
 
#568 ·
Content protection isn't really an issue since all the recordings are encrypted and will only play on that TiVo. I just don't know how many people would dedicate 3 or 4 TB and pull the drive just to back up their content.

I'll keep it in mind.
Yes, I see your point however with the much larger drives, you have so much more at stack and with more and more cable companies setting the copy once flag, backing up with Kmttg/desktop isn't as good as it once was. My cable provider just inflicted the copy limits on me this last January and I wasn't aware of the woes of such until just recently.

If my 3tb drive in my Roamio dies with no backup, I will be a basket case.
 
#569 ·
I have a series 2 with 2 upgraded 250gb drives in it, the drives are dying so i went to go back it up. It made me select "full" option since it detected both drives. The image it backed up is only 240gb, did it only backup one drive? or is this normal? i didnt see a way to select both drives to backup at once, i just selected the main one.
Well i plugged the drive in the Tivo and it said it was missing a previously attached external drive. Let it load and 90% of the recordings are gone. Is there anyway to get them off the other drive?
 
#570 ·
Well i plugged the drive in the Tivo and it said it was missing a previously attached external drive. Let it load and 90% of the recordings are gone. Is there anyway to get them off the other drive?
No, they are stored using both drives at the same time, parts on 1 drive and other parts on the other.
 
#572 ·
Yes, I see your point however with the much larger drives, you have so much more at stack and with more and more cable companies setting the copy once flag, backing up with Kmttg/desktop isn't as good as it once was. My cable provider just inflicted the copy limits on me this last January and I wasn't aware of the woes of such until just recently.

If my 3tb drive in my Roamio dies with no backup, I will be a basket case.
eboydog - Luckily for me on FiOS it's still just Cinemax & HBO that's flagged as copy-once. But even for copy-once shows, kmttg has devised a pretty good solution several versions ago but you'll have to spend a little bit to get that benefit.

Basically you'll need to buy a slingbox and then use kmttg to capture the slingbox signal. Read up on kmttg's wiki if you are interested in this feature. It may be a bit more manual process than regular kmttg operation but it works.
 
#573 ·
I have a series 2 with 2 upgraded 250gb drives in it, the drives are dying so i went to go back it up. It made me select "full" option since it detected both drives. The image it backed up is only 240gb, did it only backup one drive? or is this normal? i didnt see a way to select both drives to backup at once, i just selected the main one.
To back up both drives you have two options:

1) Do two separate Full backups (one for each drive).

2) Connect both drives to the computer and choose Modified Full backup. When it asks you to select a drive pick the primary drive. It will see that it's married and ask you to select the second drive.

Either method will result in a separate VHD file for each drive, which you can restore one at a time. Modified Full should be faster and result in smaller files since it skips the unused sectors.
 
#575 ·
...but if you purchase a HD movie off Amazon which is tied to the box, if you lose the drive, you lose the purchase (Gravity HD I paid $20 bucks for!). I doubt Amazon will refund my money or offer an additional download ability in say, two years from now should my Roamio drive go bad which it will eventually since no hard drive last forever.
I think you are mistaken about this. It is my understanding that Amazon limits the number of copies you can have on any device to 2 (at least this is true for my copy of Prometheus).
I have one copy on my TivoHD and one still available for download to another device.
I assume if I were to delete the copy on my TivoHD, the download count would go back to 2, because I wouldn't have a copy of the movie on any device.
Having said that, I am not going to test this on the small chance I am wrong. :p If anyone else can confirm what I said above is true, please speak up, otherwise my curiosity may get the better of me. :)
 
#576 ·
I think you are mistaken about this. It is my understanding that Amazon limits the number of copies you can have on any device to 2 (at least this is true for my copy of Prometheus).
I have one copy on my TivoHD and one still available for download to another device.
I assume if I were to delete the copy on my TivoHD, the download count would go back to 2, because I wouldn't have a copy of the movie on any device.
Having said that, I am not going to test this on the small chance I am wrong. :p If anyone else can confirm what I said above is true, please speak up, otherwise my curiosity may get the better of me. :)
I have done this a few times before. After you delete the program, you need to also remove it from "Recently Deleted". Once the Tivo syncs again with Amazon, the download counter should increment. In any case, Amazon has great customer service and if there is any issue, they can adjust it manually.
 
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