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Optimum Solution for Backing-up HDR-Fox T2 Recordings (not CF)?

N

Newcoppiceman

Active Member
As our 15-year-old HDR-Fox T2 is still on its original 500GB HDD I've finally resolved to implement a scheme to regularly backup the folders/programmes it contains to external hard media on a regular basis. The HDD is currently about three-quarters full and its contents actively managed.

I have two spare working units whose HDDs I can pinch should the in-service HDD fail - or show signs it's about to - or implement alternative storage solutions as detailed elsewhere. Many of the recordings are of snooker with some HD files running to several hours.

I don't currently have the custom firmware installed. I did install it in autumn 2023 but then had all sorts of issues, normal operation finally being restored some six months later after removing it and performing a system flush; the PVR has been good-as-gold since then. Analysis of the HDD while the CF was installed showed it was in remarkably good condition (but that was a year ago).

So I'm looking for a regime for backing-up the HDD which doesn't use CF or a separate computer. That each backup might take ages isn't necessarily a problem if it can be done overnight, say. Ideally I'd have 7 external backup hard media and run a backup each day. Cost is less of an issue than ensuring a straightforward, reliable means of creating copies of the HDD's content. Thoughts and suggestions invited, especially from those who might already have such regimes in place.
 
The simplest would be to plug a USB drive into the box and manually start copies of the latest recordings as part of your daily ritual
 
MymsMan said:
The simplest would be to plug a USB drive into the box and manually start copies of the latest recordings as part of your daily ritual
Click to expand...
Worth considering, I suppose. This would be an incremental backup approach rather than making several full copies each week to different hardware which would provide more redundancy and might be simpler, albeit that it would take longer to execute. Thanks.
 
How many full copies do you need!
Once you have made your first full copy it would be faster to make duplicates on another machine - the Humax has a pretty slow USB transfer speed.
Obviously some copies should be moved offsite for safety.
There is little point in backing up every day recordings made a year ago - you only need to backup recordings made since the full copy

But is it really worth the effort - how often do you rewatch old snooker matches!
 
MymsMan said:
How many full copies do you need!
Once you have made your first full copy it would be faster to make duplicates on another machine - the Humax has a pretty slow USB transfer speed.
Obviously some copies should be moved offsite for safety.
There is little point in backing up every day recordings made a year ago - you only need to backup recordings made since the full copy

But is it really worth the effort - how often do you rewatch old snooker matches!
Click to expand...
Much will depend on how long it actually takes to copy (up to) 500GB to USB-connected storage. Do you know what the PVR's USB transfer speed is? Multiple full copies provide better security than just relying on one. If I did a daily full backup (to capture latest recordings) and that (a) took an acceptable length of time, and (b) was simple to do (ie I wouldn't need to identify the latest recordings) then I would get 7 copies of more-or-less up-to-date backups as a by-product.

I never watch old snooker matches, but I am just about to watch the last few frames of 2024's (yes, 2024's) Crucible final as it has taken me over a year to watch all the coverage I recorded last year. And I have some 37 files of this year's tournament on the HDD.
 
I'm not sure how you'll produce incremental backups without some (external?) aid. I don't think using the standard HDR firmware to copy, say a folder/directory folder1 from the internal drive to external drive will work well after the first copy. I.e Will it ignore it so that you won't have duplicate files or will it produce another copy (with new suffixes)?

There is the added complication of what if you delete fileX from folder1 on the internal drive after the last backup?
How will that reflect on the external drive backup - should it do nothing or should it also remove the fileX?
How are you going to implement the preferred action?

Edit: it looks like copying previously selected files to the same destination will not produce duplicate files, it should just ignore them. So, in theory you could copy 'My Video' to to external drive. The first copy (to an empty destination) will take ages, but subsequent copies to the same destination should be much quicker - as it'll only copy the new files. There is the issue - what to do with deleted files.
 
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Looking at some other threads, it appears the USB transfer speed is around 2-10MB/s and limited by the PVR's SoC (System on Chip) so that would be an order of magnitude too slow to be practical.
 
You could test the transfer speed - copy some files over and work out how long it'll take for your 375GB of files.
Mine takes roughly 10 minutes to copy 5.3GiB to USB2 spinning hard drive.
 
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IF you can achieve 10MBs then a full backup would take about 10.5 hours so just about possible on a daily basis,
but I still think it would be better to do a full backup (possibly over several days) and then incremental backups of newer recordings on a daily basis,
Somehow you would need to track what had been deleted and did not need to be restored following a disk failure.
 
Newcoppiceman said:
Worth considering, I suppose. This would be an incremental backup approach rather than making several full copies each week to different hardware which would provide more redundancy and might be simpler, albeit that it would take longer to execute. Thanks.
Click to expand...
You will not get a full copy overnight. The transfer through the USB interface is quite slow.
As others said, how many full copies do you really need?
The other thing is that as you are backing up HD files they will not be decrypted as you are not using the CF. So once they are copied off to backup if your machine fails in a terminal manner you won't be able to play them on another machine anyway. SD recordings get decrypted as they are copied.
 
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antipodean said:
The transfer through the USB interface is quite slow.
Click to expand...
Indeed. I conducted trials back in the early days (2011) and wrote them up in my Trail Guide. If you [the OP] really want to stick with non-CF, the Trail Guide is about what can be done with the unmodded HDR-FOX... but CF opens so many more possibilities. In particular, with CF you could back up to a NAS – even automatically.

Black Hole said:
I don't know how long the same copy would have taken to a USB memory stick, but copying 5.86GB to the portable drive took about 34 minutes. It only took 3 minutes to get it into the PC! For comparison, I copied 6 half-hour (+padding) radio recordings to a FAT32 USB stick (which means 18 files - no thumbnail on radio recordings), totalling 1.7GB in 9 minutes. The surprise is that it is roughly 200MB/min either to USB hard drive or to USB Flash drive. However, the USB stick then took 1:40 to copy into the PC.
Click to expand...

An alternative for non-CF is to use FTP (see Trail Guide), which runs at least twice as fast. A big advantage in not using the on-screen menus to do big copies is that it tends to bomb out.

antipodean said:
So once they are copied off to backup if your machine fails in a terminal manner you won't be able to play them on another machine anyway.
Click to expand...
Not strictly true: we have the stripts utility to run on any Linux computer that can decrypt files (with knowledge of the serial number and MAC of the machine that recorded them), and something similar for Windows.
 
I just use FileZilla. I have autodcrypt enabled so all my recordings are decrypted before backing up. Using FileZilla, I FTP into the Humax and simply select which/all recordings and folders I wish to backup and that is basically it. I have several hard drives in my PC with more than enough capacity to store the recordings and also a NAS. After I have transferred the recordings onto the HDD I do check that they have been decrypted using VLC. I don't want to delete anything from my Humax without checking first.
 
I've been looking for an excuse to buy another Framework computer - maybe I've found it. I will investigate creating full backups using the FTP method. I have a Microsoft Surface Go 3 tablet (WIn11/64GB eMMC/1 x USB-C/1 x MicroSDXC) so I'll try that first, saving to a MicroSDXC card.

My wife and I both have Framework Laptop 13s as our main computers and have a USB-C to Ethernet expansion card (which will presumably work with the Surface Go 3).

I also have two 2006-vintage Dell Inspiron 1300s which are used for Audacity audio editing/a 200MHz USB 'scope/a USB semiconductor analyser (the XP one) and as an archive of the Dell years (the Win7 one) - but I imagine these would be too ancient to consider using.

Framework released some new models this year (frame.work/gb/en) and a Laptop 12, which can be ordered sans-OS, could become a dedicated backup device (I did experiment with Linux Ubuntu a few years ago).
 
Newcoppiceman said:
I've been looking for an excuse to buy another Framework computer - maybe I've found it. I will investigate creating full backups using the FTP method.
Click to expand...

Or even just a RaspberryPi running some Python, much cheaper (except I'm not sure the RPi version of Linux can run stripts).

Be aware that you're making life hard for yourself by eschewing the CF. Not saying it can't be done, but...
  1. The native FTP server isn't very good; CF replaces the native server and allows full access (not just My Video etc).
  2. Recordings moved by FTP will need decrypting, unless all you want to do is move them back to the same physical machine. WIth CF you simply decrypt everything, quickly in hardware, immediately after (or even during) recording.
  3. Much easier to set up scripts in the CF to send new recordings to a NAS than having to identify and fetch them using scripts on a remote computer. There is already experience on the forum.
  4. Could use DLNA methods rather than FTP (even without CF): that decrypts StDef on download, and if CF is used to unprotect HiDef that can be decrypted in-flight too.
  5. I know you've had "peculiarities" which seem to correlate with installing the CF, but there is no corroboration of the same from other users. CF has a long track record of being reliable, more reliable than native Humax code.
 
Black Hole said:
Or even just a RaspberryPi running some Python, much cheaper (except I'm not sure the RPi version of Linux can run stripts).
Click to expand...
Have only dabbled a little with Arduino, not Raspberry Pi or Python so out of my comfort zone. My background is in hardware, not coding.
Black Hole said:
Be aware that you're making life hard for yourself by eschewing the CF. Not saying it can't be done, but...
  1. The native FTP server isn't very good; CF replaces the native server and allows full access (not just My Video etc).
  2. Recordings moved by FTP will need decrypting, unless all you want to do is move them back to the same physical machine. WIth CF you simply decrypt everything, quickly in hardware, immediately after (or even during) recording.
  3. Much easier to set up scripts in the CF to send new recordings to a NAS than having to identify and fetch them using scripts on a remote computer. There is already experience on the forum.
  4. Could use DLNA methods rather than FTP (even without CF): that decrypts StDef on download, and if CF is used to unprotect HiDef that can be decrypted in-flight too.
  5. I know you've had "peculiarities" which seem to correlate with installing the CF, but there is no corroboration of the same from other users. CF has a long track record of being reliable, more reliable than native Humax code.
Click to expand...
1 - Noted, but for the price of a MicroSDXC card worth a punt with the MS Surface Go 3 to kick things off.
2 - Principal aim is to protect against HDD failure, but noted.
3 - You lost me at "set up scripts", I'm afraid. I was quite pleased I was able to create a batch file to run (manually) to restart the printer spooler on my Win 11 Framework laptop to get it to work with an old HP printer, though.
4 - I'll get my head around FTP first, I think; not familiar with DLNA.
5 - Maybe I'll give CF another shot if my initial FTP tests aren't fruitful. Thank goodness for the system flush though - that really saved my bacon as reverting to non-CF firmware alone wasn't enough.
 
+1 for installing CF.

AFAIK, that would then also give you the option of running RSYNC, which would make incremental backups to a suitable server much easier.
 
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