Full Backup

ReRaven said:

I want to make a full backup (with recordings) just not sure how, or if it can be done because of the 2 gig limit in fat partitions. Would trying to compress the backup help? and if so what is the exact command?

Also it's a dsr 704

Click to expand...

www.MFSlive.org for iso Download but highly unlikely that you can compress 40GB into 2GB.

I thought so
Thanks

You can only do a "full" backup from one TiVo drive to a new TiVo drive, not from the TiVo drive to a FAT partition drive. If you do a backup to a FAT partition, it only saves the system information, like thumb settings and season passes and wishlists and the operating system. Just no shows.

Hope that helps,
robomeister

It's been a while since I used mfstools, but if you wanted to do a full backup to a FAT partition (assuming you had adequate space for the entire backup), couldn't you compress and split the output from mfsbackup? Something like:

That should create a series of 2gb "pieces" that you'd have to feed back to mfsrestore like:

(please note I'm doing syntax from memory so it's probably not correct)

You still can't make a backup containing all recordings though.

Whoops, just realized I used mfstools in my example. So ok, what if you used dd instead? That should image everything.

I realize this might not be helping the OP, sorry ...

dd should work if done correctly, it would take quite a while though depending on the amount of recordings being transferred.

You could make a dd backup of a full drive with something simple like

In practice (I've done it), or in theory anyways, you can back up to an EXT3 drive greater than the capacity, and free space, of the drive you are backing up. It is more practical to just copy to another drive of adequate capacity though.