Can I swap TiVo drives as a method of archiving?

I understood that when you swap drives it will reformat the drive, regardless if it was used in that Tivo already

Hopefully someone with more experience will chime in to confirm (or correct me)

 

No it won’t work.

 

I swapped the 1 TB drive I had in my TiVo S3 before it was deactivated from the last upgrade offer. I put the original 250GB drive in, and all the shows were intact after several years of storage. The TiVo did upgrade software, but the recordings are intact.

So if you have multiple drives set up for that particular TSN, you may be able to swap drives for archival purposes. Since TiVos aren't designed for easy drive swaps, there is a risk of harm at some point if you're not careful.

 

Advertisements

Drives swaps changed with Roamio. They are very easy with Roamio and Bolt.

 

Why not? Maybe I read the question wrong? You can't swap out drives on a Bolt and keep recordings. But should work on a Roamio. I keep my old drives as backups when I upgrade or just want to replace the drive if it's getting old. I've swapped out drives within the same Roamio with no problems. As far as I can tell if you fill up a Roamio drive you can pull it, store it, put in a new drive (or copy/expand the one being replaced), then if you want to put in the one you pulled at any time it will work. You could have as many "backup" drives as you want, all with different recordings as long as they were recorded on the exact same Roamio. Again cannot do that with a Bolt but has worked fine for me with Roamios.

 

There could be issues if you are switching back and forth with Gen 3 and NE4/Hydra. I myself am on Gen 3 and don't plan on changing. That would affect the relationship between the flash drive and the hard drives. If you do use drives as "backups" might want to put them in anytime there is a major software update. Really easy to swap drives, on a Plus or Pro just a few screws, Basic Roamio a LITTLE tougher because of the snaps/tabs. Really you can have multiple drives with different recordings for ANY Tivo other than a Bolt.

 

Well every time you swap drives on a Bolt you lose a lot, even if you just put a new one in, take it out and put in the original. At least in my experience a year or so ago. The Bolt has more on the flash drive than the Roamio, at least it used to. I have never had any problems swapping Roamio drives with Gen 3, can put in a "backup", it will be intact, then take out the backup and put the current drive back in, it will be fine. But maybe get a few more opinions, 2TB a lot to "mess" with, it has worked for ME but since some people say it will not maybe something changed with the Roamio software since I did the "swaps".

 

On Roamios, only the six OS partitions are in flash memory. Bolts also keep the Linux /var partition in flash and the SQLite partition on the hard drive is only 250MB instead of 3GB like previous models. That makes me think that most or all of the SQLite database has also been moved to flash, and would explain why swapping drives doesn't work.

 

This could make a difference. Not with swapping around the Roamio drives but not sure if you can transfer recordings from a NE4/Hydra Bolt to a Gen 3 Roamio directly (you could test that if you have the NE4 Bolt and a Gen 3 Roamio hooked up now, just try it). I only had a Bolt hooked up for a year or so, it was on Gen 3 and I had no problems transferring shows between it and my Roamios directly. But that may have changed based on what I have seen here and not sure how NE4/Hydra affects things, a lot of features have changed with the latest versions of NE4.

 

hydra to gen3 needs to be done via tivo online

 

Have you considered getting an 8TB drive, jumping through the hoops with the special drive formatting software and having all your shows archived online? Maybe put a larger drive on your Black Friday / Cyber Monday shopping list.

 

I think you mean Encore (gen3) to Hydra needs TiVo online; you can pull from Hydra to Encore as always. (leiff beat me while I was typing!)

 

Do you have a second Roamio you can test it with? I'm a bit unclear about all the Tivos you have, for sure a Bolt with NE4 and the Roamio with the 2TB. If you have a second Roamio with not much on it use it for the test. Pull the drive, put in a blank, maybe do a recording or two, then pull it and put the original back in. If the original still has what was on it then you SHOULD be good to go. Don't pull any drives out of Bolts unless you are prepared to lose almost everything, IF you put in any other drive, if you pull and do nothing you can put the original back in.

 

I guess I'm wrong then--I thought if you put an old drive into your Roamio (for example, one that has been pulled out of it previously that still has recordings on it, as in this case with the poster), it will erase it.

 

I agree with that. Perhaps I will have a reason to test it soon.