I have a Dish TV 722 DVR.
I attached a 750GB external USB hard drive & paid Dish a $40 activation fee to use the external hard drive with the DVR.

The DVR software - reportedly Linux-based - only MOVEs files from the DVR to the USB drive & back. I won't simply create a copy of the file.

Every major brand USB hard drive I have found on the internet has many customer complaints about reliability - i.e. loss of data. Even the RAID systems apparently fail completely.

So I would like to make 2 copies of my files on separate USB drives, in case one drive fails.

Does anyone know of 722 DVR software that allows files to be COPIED to an external drive?

Does anyone know of non-Dish software that can read the Dish-formatted external drive, such that I could copy the files to a second drive?

Note that I am not trying to evade copyright issues.
I simply want a reliable medium to store my video files.

Thanks, John

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

I'm not familiar with your DVR or how it handles files but if it is Linux based filesystem then copying files from the drive should be easy with any Linux file utility. In effect you could use 'dd' to copy the whole disk. If you have another system with Linux then you could just remove the drive from the DVR then attach to the Linux machine. The device should be recognized then you could either use the cli to copy the whole drive with 'dd', 'cp' or even 'mv'. You should 'man command' to understand each.

If you want to use a GUI like 'mc' from the cli then things would be easy. Else use one from the wm or X environment of choice for your desktop for distribution of choice.

Thank you for that answer.
I have a Linux installation on another machine, but I have not yet learned how to use it.
This at least gives me hope that an answer is out there somewhere.
I will boot the Linux machine & connect the USB drive.
Hopefully DishTV did not do anything special to the file system when it reformatted the USB drive.
So far, it appears that DishTV worked to make such tasks more difficult than necessary for subscribers.

Thanks again,
John

Hi,

I really think that the Dish people would not put another layer of complexity. My bet is that it may be something like 'XFS' for the filesystem or it could be a ext2. I don't think a journal ext3 would be of need for video as this would place overhead.

I decided to google and found that the 'Dish TV 722 DVR' does use the 'XFS' filesystem. So you can use the Gnu/Linux and 'XFS' utilities on the filesystem. The satellite site does have some activity so you could present specific questions to them related to your DVR.

A few years ago, this was a simple task. Just mount the disk in an external enclosure in Linux, and copy the .tsp files to the target drive, and reinstall the DVR disk. This was for Dish 625, and some other Dish receiver standard def receivers.

I have a newer 625 now, with an upgraded DVR operating system, and recorded files are placed onto a RAW partition, and can be mounted, but copying is not working.

I pulled the disk, did a dd copy task, mounted it in Windows with MATT Wu's EXT2Fsd app, and Quick Formatted the partition NTFS, then did a file recovery. I recovered 700+ files - none the right size for an entire movie. I think they are all segmented, and possibly demuxed. Plus, the dd copy task froze near the end, so that is also a problem.

Some videos DO play, but they are NOT videos that I've recorded; they're promos.

Any feedback here?

// Since you created a new thread people wanting to contribute should do so here instead: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ask...-739753/