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TiVo Backup Farm

Folks, what do you think about this idea?

We all know the importance of backups when doing the TiVo disk upgrades but it strikes me that it's rather inefficient that every single upgrader needs to keep his/her own backup. If the TiVo is not a virgin this usually means a spare hard disk with the associated expense and hassle of copying etc. I wonder how many people "wing it" and skip the backup because of this.

What about the idea of a sort of "backup farm". If some people were to set up a system where they offered to keep backups of all the original machine configurations then upgraders would no longer need to keep there own individual backups. If something went wrong in future they'd just send their disk into the farm to have it restored to an original configuration (perhaps for a modest fee).

Now I understand that with the plethora of systems available in the US (with different OS versions too) this might be less practical than it is over here in the UK (we only have one manufacturer with a 30+15Gb dual and a 40Gb single drive model). However, if a bunch of people got together "in a ring" then it might be viable even in the US.

It seems to me that such an arrangement would "kill two birds with one stone", as follows:

1) It would make upgrading much cheaper and easier. First you'd register yourself with your local "farm" and provide your OS version. The farm would then confirm that they had a backup of this and you could go ahead. You'd then only need to get hold of a blessed big drive... stick it in and you'd be away.

2) Another *big* advantage is that it would avoid all these worries that come about when an OS upgrade comes out. Currently, the idea is to replace your original backup some days before the OS release and have this upgrade itself and then perform your BIGTiVo(tm) upgrade again. This is annoying since it is time consuming and it wipes all the 120 hours (or whatever) of programmes you've amassed so far.

With the farm idea you just leave your BIGTiVo running and let it upgrade as normal. No loss of programmes and no irritation to TiVo due to multiple OS downloads. The farm is responsible for letting the backup disks upgrade normally (keeping a backup of the backup if necessary). Still only one upgrade per registered farm machine needs to occur.

The only times anyone would need to get a backup restored would be if a disk crashes or if TiVo pull the plug on all upgraders. In these rare situations I doubt whether people would mind paying out $50 for a backup restore and being without their TiVo for a few days.

I'm not sure how it could be organised but it might be interesting to consider? What do you say?

Best regards,

Andy Bower

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: N.Ireland
Posts: 125

Fair point. However I would always want my own personal backup anyway. I like to be as self sufficient as possible.

As a fall back position it is a good idea, a backup to your backup.

Even better would be a CD from Tivo with the software on it, costing say $20 which you could get on the understanding that you cannot call CS and to use it you will have to void your warranty.

Just my tuppence worth.

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A CD from Tivo with a pristine compressed drive image for the specific models (14 hour philips, 30 hour philips, etc...) would be a very nice thing for us hacker types to have. It would certainly reduce the complexity of restoring images. I know it's a long shot, but any chance something like this could happen?

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