Recover my son's files

[tmbr]

I have read alot of posts but maybe I am missing something. Is there or is there not a way to recover files from a "crashed" drive? I have so much stuff on the original drive that I want to recover. My son keeps asking for specific episodes and I don't know what to do - there must be a way! Help!

[Dkerr24]

google 'spinrite'. It's a disk repair tool that may work.

[gregpg]

Get a new blank drive the same size as or larger than the original. Then, go to http://www.mfslive.org/fullguide.htm, burn the boot CD, and try dd_rescue.

[mr.unnatural]

Your situation is one that happens more times than I can count. Lots of Tivo owners tend to use their Tivos for long term storage and treat it like a server where they can leave recordings and expect them to be there forever. The usual result is that the drive dies and they're left with nothing. It's nice that people can upgrade their Tivos with terabyte drives but all they're doing is setting themselves up for this very scenario. There's nothing more frustrating than losing several hundred hours of recordings.

My school of thought is to install a drive large enough to handle all of my season passes and allow me to keep several weeks worth of programming if I get behind in my viewing. I never keep anything on the Tivo long term because I know I'm just asking for trouble if I do. If I have anything I deem worth keeping then I'll offload it and store it on some other medium, such as a separate server or burn it to DVD.

Sorry for the soapbox rant but I just wanted to provide some food for thought about how you use your Tivo. Chances are if you have more than a hundred hours of shows on your Tivo you probably don't have the time to watch them anyway.

The above suggestions are good places to start with regards to recovering your data. I'd try to run the manufacturer's diagnostics program on the drive first and see how that goes. Make sure you select the nondestructive tests. If it fails then I'd try to find a copy of SpinRite (bittorrent is your friend). Depending on the size of your drive, SpinRite can take a long time to run (about 50 hours for a 250GB drive in maintenance mode) so you might want to use a PC that won't be needed for anything else for a couple of days. I have used it to successfully recover a crashed drive but it may not necesarily work for you. If there are surface defects on the drive that caused the crash then SpinRite could fix them. If the drive is just plain dying then nothing will help if the drive is too far gone.

[NA9D]

If I have anything I deem worth keeping then I'll offload it and store it on some other medium, such as a separate server or burn it to DVD.


This is good advice and if you can afford it, get a RAID drive to store it on your server. At one point I had about 600 Gigabytes of shows I'd downloaded from my ReplayTVs. Most shows were about 800 MB in size so that's a lot of shows. One of my drives died costing me about 300 Gigs worth of shows. I'd not backed them up.

The bottom line is that relying on any drive as a single point storage medium is asking for trouble regardless of wether its in a computer or DVR. If you want truly reliable long storage you need a RAID or multiple backups.

I'd also suggest that if you have shows you really want to keep, consider using an online backup service like Mozy. It takes a while to get everything up there but at $5.00 a month for unlimited storage it's peace of mind. I've got about 550 Gig of stuff up there now (took me several months to get it up to their servers!).

[mr.unnatural]

An inexpensive server solution is unRAID by Lime Technology. It's easy to set up and use and you can mix and match drives of different types (IDE and SATA) and sizes. It uses a parity drive so if one drive dies it's a snap to restore the lost data. I've got an unRAID setup with over 4TB of storage (6x750GB + 1x250GB +750GB for parity). I use it for storing ripped DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs and stream them back to my HTPC for playback. I rarely keep more than 30-40 hours of programming on either of my S3 Tivos unless I've already backed it up on my PC. I usually get around to watching any shows I've recorded via season passes in a timely manner (i.e. within a week or two of being recorded but no longer than three weeks if I can help it). That way I'm assured of minimal loss should a drive ever die on me. I only record first-run shows so there's still a chance I could catch any lost shows during reruns if the need ever arises. Besides, there are other means available to obtain lost recordings so it's never a total loss.