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MythTV File Dump

I finally managed to move all the necessary files off of the extra 250GB IDE drive I had lying around. The whole process took a pile of DVDs and CDs (some of the files were ISO files that needed to be burned to 1 CD or DVD). I also had to make a decision to let some of the data go. e.g. The 25 ISOs for an outdated version of Debian GNU/Linux.


A few weeks ago I picked up an external IDE enclosure to put the drive in. It took some time to figure out that a simple fsck on the ext3 file system was the answer to the problem of mounting the LVM file system on the drive. I didn't want to run fsck since I thought it might actually corrupt the data (since it was in a different computer). It worked, so I was able to retrieve all my old data.


Initially I was going to use the drive as a dumping space for the whole network, so I formatted it with VFAT. Maria's computer runs Windows XP and the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system is well understood by it. The problem is that FAT isn't very good with files over 4GB and most of the files on my MythTV box ARE over 4GB even with compression... so I reformatted with ReiserFS.


Using FileZilla I SFTP the files from the MythTV box to the external drive which is attached to my notebook. Yes, it would be faster to connect the drive to my MythTV box, but I also wanted to see what kind of average my network would post for data transfer of large files. The average seems to be between 3.1MB/s and 3.8MB/s.

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