When a hard drive dies

Playground Hardware
#1

A friend's CDVR setup, a Mac Mini with a 5TB Western Digital drive for Channels recordings, has failed, because the external drive died. It's clicking, not mounting, etc. We tried First Aid in Disk Utility to no avail.

He does back up his Mac, but not this external Channels drive. He says the recordings aren't important enough, he's not too pressed about their loss. Phew. He does however watch live TV, has his setup customized the way he likes it, and a bunch of season passes whose recordings he watches and deletes pretty quickly,

As of now he can still navigate Channels' webUI and browse the Channels interface, but obviously, no previous recordings play. The drive is gone. He's just buying a new HDD to replace the one that died. So what's the best way to get him back up and running now with Channels? I mean, without having to set it all up as a new install? He's not one to participate in forums and he's asked me for help. Thanks for any advice, I appreciate it.

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#2

Mount the drive, format the drive using disk tool, add a folder to the drive called dvr. In the dvr web ui under settings, general, uncheck the enable dvr box. Add the storage location as the drive/dvr folder. Re enable the dvr check box and that’s it.
Easy peasy. The reason it is still working is because the dvr software is running on his main drive and only the recordings were on the external.

If he lost his recordings he probably lost his dvr backups as well. I’d suggest after the above is finished go ahead and manually do a backup of the dvr and copy that backup to the internal hard drive or a usb thumb drive. The backup will be found in the folder at externaldrive/dvr/database

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#3
  1. Which is precisely why a use a real file system ZFS for storage of critical data.
  2. Remember RAID is not a backup, RAID is resiliency.
  3. Follow the 3-2-1 backup principle. 3-copies, 2-different media, 1-offsite.

TrueNAS CORE or SCALE accomplishes that well.

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#4

Set it up with the same name so new recordings go there, or update the dvr storage location.

Then run prune recordings

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