Anyone Ghosting their External Drive?

[zevs]

I've got a 622 with an external drive and they're both getting full. A lot of the stuff is shows you can't get on DVD, so I just want them archived to watch later.

I thought about getting another large EHD, but then had a thought. Can't I get another, smaller, cheaper EHD, copy some shows from the 622's drive onto it, remove it from the 622, plug in into my PC's USB, Ghost it, Zip the Ghost file, and burn it to a data DVD (as long as the size is under the DVD's capacity)?

Then I can plug the drive back into the 622, delete all the recordings, and repeat this again. Then later, get an image back off a DVD to the PC, unzip it, ghost it back onto the EHD, pop it back into the 622 and watch the recordings.

I know I wouldn't be able to do anything else with the DVD like pop it in and a normal player and expect it to do anything, but wouldn't this be cheaper than continually purchasing more EHD's?

Has anyone tried this with any success?

 

[KAB]

I've got a 622 with an external drive and they're both getting full. A lot of the stuff is shows you can't get on DVD, so I just want them archived to watch later.

I thought about getting another large EHD, but then had a thought. Can't I get another, smaller, cheaper EHD, copy some shows from the 622's drive onto it, remove it from the 622, plug in into my PC's USB, Ghost it, Zip the Ghost file, and burn it to a data DVD (as long as the size is under the DVD's capacity)?

Then I can plug the drive back into the 622, delete all the recordings, and repeat this again. Then later, get an image back off a DVD to the PC, unzip it, ghost it back onto the EHD, pop it back into the 622 and watch the recordings.

I know I wouldn't be able to do anything else with the DVD like pop it in and a normal player and expect it to do anything, but wouldn't this be cheaper than continually purchasing more EHD's?

Has anyone tried this with any success?

No can do. Files are encrypted and HD is formatted Linux.

 

[Smith P.]

Yes, Ghost will serve your idea well.

Unfortunately no players available to play the encrypted content from EHD or those files directly.

 

[cparker]

I don't think the OP is talking about playing them anywhere else. Just archiving a hard drive image to DVD of whatever is on the hard drive, erasing the hard drive and starting it over, and then later on, restoring that image back onto the hard drive to view normally.

I don't think that would technically break any rules, but I think you'd be hard pressed to get an image of a full hard drive onto one DVD. If you did, it would involve high compression. Would your movies survive intact? Probably. Would a full HD image fit on a single DVD? I suppose this depends on the hard drive size, but I kinda doubt it. As you know, you wouldn't be able to pop said DVD into a DVD player and if I'm reading this correctly that's not your intent anyways.

Theoretically this would work. Entire hard drive image. If the entire image won't fit on a DVD can you archive just a few files?? I don't think so. I think it would mess up the indexing.

 

[Smith P.]

It wouldn't mess up index, the disk have logical organization, not RAW partition.

 

[8bitbytes]

I would hate to see how many dvds you will need to ghost a 500 or 750gb hard disk!

 

[Smith P.]

Use -z9 compression.

 

[8bitbytes]

Use -z9 compression.

What will that give you for a compression rate when compressing MPEG4? 2:1? 3:1?

 

[Smith P.]

No, the files will not compressed by that - only empty sectors.

 

[8bitbytes]

No, the files will not compressed by that - only empty sectors.

So you will still need a stack of dvdrs to ghost a full drive. I'd rather just use spare drives.

 

[Smith P.]

Switch to BR disks .

 

[DISH_NC]

Switch to BR disks .

At $15 for a single BR disc (with shipping) with only 5x the capacity of a DVD-R??? No thanks.. Cheaper to buy more hard drives, by a HUGE margin...

500GB of hard drive = $140 max. 500GB of BR Disc = $300

 

[haertig]

You could Ghost it, but you'd have to do a bit for bit copy. I would boot Linux off of a LiveCD and use dd rather than Ghost myself. Bit for bit is not the default for Ghost, but it can do it. Ghost works by understanding the filesystem it is ghosting, and throwing away "unneeded" stuff (like swap files, temp files, unused sectors, etc.) If it doesn't know the filesystem, it can only do a bit for bit copy (Ghost doesn't know Linux filesystems AFAIK - especially encrypted ones!)

Add encryption to what you are Ghosting (the Dish stuff would definitely be encrypted) and you'll find you get very little, if any compression out of even the best compression algorithms. Attempting to compress sometimes even makes the output larger! Compression algorithms do best on data with repeating patterns - something your don't see with encryption (you see just the opposite!) So even a small HDD, say 100Gb, would still take almost 25 DVDs. That's a lot of DVDs and a helluva long time Ghosting and un-Ghosting!

I would be willing to bet with that amount of data Ghosted to that many DVDs you'd run into an error somewhere. Probably not detected during the Ghosting, but detected when you tried to un-Ghost. And then you'd get to cry over your lost programming as you read the fatal error message...

 

[Smith P.]

Ghost does EXT2 partitons.

 

[haertig]

Ghost does EXT2 partitons.

Probably. But chances are Dish isn't using ONLY standard EXT2 partitions. It could be encrypted partition(s) or normal partitions with one big "container" file that gets decrypted/mounted. And the way Dish says the external must be formatted by the Dish receiver, and then they somehow limit the externals use to only certain receivers indicates to me that they're possibly messing around with track 0 (or some other "hidden" area) too - which throws you right back to the need for a bit for bit copy.

There are (or were?) G4U/G4L opensource projects that give a Ghost-type functionality to Unix and Linux systems.

Acknowledging that a Ghost-like thing could be done to copy the external HDD, you still have the issue of a massive stack of DVDs and a loooonnnngggg time to do all the work.

 

[Smith P.]

Good discussion ... Between who did and knows and other who don't.

 

[whatchel1]

"Ghost"

Even if you "ghost" to have it in HD as opposed to SD it would be necessary to use a BR disc. Maybe someday but it won't happen soon.

 

[haertig]

Even if you "ghost" to have it in HD as opposed to SD it would be necessary to use a BR disc.

No, you're just slinging raw data. The OP is not talking about playing back directly from the DVD, only using it as a backup medium that they would later restore from. You could do that using floppy disks (a whole LOT of 'em!)

 

[RandallA]

Will this work?

Since we're talking about Ghost, I'd like to ask this. I have a 320 GB EHD that has been working fine with a 622 receiver. But lately, it's been having problems on playback with the new update L449.

I'm thinking of getting another EHD (WD 500 GB) and ghost the 320 GB into the new one. Will the 622 recognize the new EHD? and will it show the extra space? I don't see why this wouldn't work but just wanted to make sure.

 

[charlesrshell]

Since we're talking about Ghost, I'd like to ask this. I have a 320 GB EHD that has been working fine with a 622 receiver. But lately, it's been having problems on playback with the new update L449.

I'm thinking of getting another EHD (WD 500 GB) and ghost the 320 GB into the new one. Will the 622 recognize the new EHD? and will it show the extra space? I don't see why this wouldn't work but just wanted to make sure.

RandallA, I have a Western Digital 500G model #5000C032 attached to a VIP722 and it works great. But, I haven't done any ghosting stuff.