Local DVR Storage locations

Channels DVR Server
#1

So I have been using Channels for a couple months and like it. I am a previous SageTV user and still have the system setup and working at the moment, but slowly moving to Channels. I am using Plex to watch shows on a Roku at a couple TVs which seems fine for now.

Anyway, on my Channels server (win10 machine) I have 4 External HDs I used for SAGETV as well. now I have the main Channels folder set to H:\Channels, but I also have a second folder as F:\Channels, currently I move shows manually from the H:\ path to the F:\ poath.

Is there a way to setup a automated process to move them for me? maybe once done recording? just trying to keep ahead of filling up the main recording drive.. With Sage is would automatically manage where it put recordings across multiple drives. I am sure I could format the external box to act as one big drive,, but I have no place to temporarily move the data.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

#2

Why not record to F: directly?

#3

can i record to 2 different Drives?

#4

No. I'm just trying to understand why you're recording and moving in the first place.

#5

This has been one of my biggest struggles. I have 3 x 10TB drives and haven't found a reliable way to redistribute recordings other than to do it manually. When the main drive fills, I move groups of recordings to whittle it down.

FYI, the other biggest struggle with favorites management was completely fixed with collections!

I didn't think you can easily do that. How do you switch between which drive is the one being recorded to without moving a bunch of stuff around to make a different drive the main drive.

#6

I describe the process here:

#7

I want to move so I don't hit the max for the drive.. SageTV Allowed for multiple storage locations and it determined where to put it.. I will need to see if I can move all my recorded data and make one big virtual drive and use that..

#8

Correct me if I'm wrong, but changing the path this way will require me to move the Images, Database, Logs, and Streaming folders from the old primary drive to the new primary drive, right? I didn't want to mess with them, but maybe that is easier than what I've been doing.

#9

Possibly, but are they that significant that they need to be maintained on the primary drive?

  • Images – These will be recreated or re-downloaded on demand, so no real loss there
  • Database – These are backups, and new ones will be created on the new primary.
  • Logs – These are the recording and comskip logs, identified by recording number. They can easily be referenced on the secondary location in case you need them, but otherwise they're not needed for regular operation.
  • Streaming – These are the cache files for transcoded streams for remote or clients not using original format.

So, you can keep and manually move over any of those folders. But in practice, they're not necessary, and Channels will recreate them on demand for new needs.

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#10

Does it cause any problems leaving them on the old primary drive if they will be recreated? I've been going to a lot of trouble here that appears to be totally unnecessary. I guess I'll give this a shot at switching it as soon as nothing is going on on the server.

#11

OK, I tried this and seems to be working.

What was surprising and a little alarming was when I disabled the DVR, it immediately put me into the 3 step setup process at step 2 asking me to pick a DVR storage location. Once I selected a DVR folder, it went to step 3, and I just selected the Support tab which was the only other one available, and then hit refresh and got all the other tabs back with the DVR running.

I tried this a couple of times and every time I deselected DVR on the Settings page, it restarted me in the 3 step setup. I don't believe this has ever happened in the past, so not sure why I can't just disable the DVR.

The good news I think, is that I seem to be able to pick any of my 3 external drives /DVR folder and it runs. Hopefully all is OK.

#12

id like this too the automated moving to a bigger drive that is

#13

Whatever I did has broken the DVR, and not sure how to get back to stability. I can watch Live TV fine, and recordings appear to be working. I can watch movies in the library fine. But if I try to watch a TV show, it does one of a few different things, but the most common is it looks like it starts but doesn't, then skips to the next episode and does thing, then skips to the next, and continues doing that.... never playing anything. Any idea what is going on.

What I did was point the DVR to one of my other 3 drives and restart it.

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#14

Did you add the old location under additional storage?

#15

I believe it was already there.

#16

Darn it. It wasn’t there. My third drive was there twice. Duh.

#17

I've been doing this with good luck.. I haven't used it extensively, but I created a quick powershell script to copy files from my local drive to my NAS. I did this because my channels machine is running on a VM so I wanted to keep the local drive small, not to waste valuable SSD space.

It's not complicated.. fundamentally just a robocopy command, and could be ported to use a similar command if you weren't running Windows. I used Robocopy because it let me easily ONLY move shows after they were one day old. That way, I dont accidentally move anything still recording, and I give channels enough time to scan for commercials, etc while still on the fast storage. I haven't watched too much archived stuff, but the few times I have tried, it has worked seamlessly. I just run this as a scheduled task once per night.

$LogPath="E:\Channels\MigrateLogs"
$date= get-date -Format %yy-%M-%d-%h-%m
$Logfile="$Logpath\$Date-MigrateLog.txt"
$From = "E:\Channels\TV"
$Target = "\\192.168.1.10\media\Channels\Content2Save\TV"
robocopy $From $Target /r:0 /e /w:0 /minage:1 /mov /tee /log:$Logfile /np
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#18

@jdebuhr I'm joining this thread late, but another option is to pool the drives with something like StableBit drive pool. You can use any size drives and put them all together for 1 big drive with a single drive letter.

#19

I'm also late to the game on this but I find this very intriguing. For me, I would love for the DVR to run solely on my Mac Mini, keep things on the Mac locally for X amount of time, then move it to my NAS after X time. Then I can have the horsepower and speed for my streaming and still utilize my gobs of NAS storage. I know I've seen things to do symlinks and whatnot...but I feel like it would be cleaner if I could control recordings from Channels DVR.

#20

One problem I'm seeming to have, is that channels wont prune old content if it has been moved to a different directory apparently.. If I set it up to only keep the 10 most recent episodes, but I then move them to my NAS, it never goes and prunes old episodes from the NAS.

Am I missing something, or is this a bug?