External Disk for Recordings

[glb1945]

Hi,
I am trying to use an external disk for my recordings on Ubuntu.
However when I enter the directory /media/jerry/Passport/Recordings
(on the external disk)
the recording fails. If I use the default /home/ jerry/recordings
( on the internal ssd) it works. Can someone help me with this issue.
Thank you.

Jerry

[mvallevand]

You choose to not Windows you need to research how to permanently mount a USB drive.

Once you have working follow the steps here to set the permissions on the mount point https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.ph...#pid524823 assuming you used the deb installer.

Martin

[snagglewest]

Here's a good link explaining how to mount USB drives
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB

I'd really recommend you use an internal drive though.  If you start up the service without the USB drive powered up/mounted then NextPVR will think the recordings are deleted and remove them from the DB.  That in turn leads to some serious cussing...  DAMHIK

[glb1945]

Hi snagglewest,

Is there anyway to ensure the usb drive is always mounted ahead of time.

Jerry

[mvallevand]

You didn't follow my instruction to research, it is not a simple solution. Focus on posts with udev, uuid and fstat

After that you need to update the start up timings to ensure the NextPVR server starts after the drive is mounted.

Martin

[snagglewest]

Martin has the best solution if you really want to go down the USB hard drive path, but as he noted, it's not for the faint of hart. A internal hard drive really is the most fool proof and easiest solution no matter what OS you're using.

[glb1945]

On windows 10 I used an external hard drive without doing anything extra. My external drive is 1TB
And my internal SSD is only 250 GB. Thus the desire to use the external drive. Linux is very powerful so there must be a way for npvr to automatically ensure the usb drive is activated before the main body of the npvr code by checking to see if the recordings are going to an external usb drive and then activating the remaining npvr code?

Jerry

[glb1945]

You can always have the user state that the recording folder is on a usb external disk, then check to see if tha disk is mounted on npvr startup. If not then mount it. If it is not there remind the user to connect it and stop?

[sub]

The user can create a PreStartup.sh script if their system needs to do anything custom before NextPVR starts. (whether something special to initialize a device, or connect to something, or mount some network drive, or if you need some sort of delay to give something a chance to start etc)

[mvallevand]

I guess my not so subtle message that linux is not Windows didn't sink it. NextPVR doesn't have any code do anything special either. You actually do have to configure Windows to get a permanent drive letter.

If you don't want to do it the proper way, you can see about writing a PreStartup.sh file that will provide enough time for the USB to start (you need that anyway) and issue a command line mount.

The beauty of the uuid approach is you can have the start wait for the USB drive to be ready

Code:

if [ ! -e usbmnt]; then
        read -d. uptime < /proc/uptime
        echo $uptime
        while [[ $uptime -lt 45 && ! -e usbmnt ]]; do
                sleep 1
                read -d. uptime < /proc/uptime
        done
fi

Martin