Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This method may have been useful in the old days where large harddisks were unavailable or hard to come by. Now we're living in the age of terabyte disks, and setting up a VDR with 1TB of video storage (even using a second disk to have a RAID-1 for data safety) os no big deal any more.
Especially with HDTV the amount of disc space, used for recordings, also got bigger.
Isn't LVM the keyword here?
No. It is virtually impossible to just merge in a second disc if the first already has data on it and hasn't been set up as LVM physical volume on first install.
You would have to move all data to another disc to set up the first VDR disc from scratch with LVM. After setting up, all data has to be copied back. I think it requires several hours to set that up. With the VDR multiple disc feature, I just install the new disc and mount it --> Setup done.
Another big disadvantage of LVM is, that it is nearly impossible to restore data of one of the LVM discs, if only one disc is available. Means: If one disc dies, all recordings are gone.
At any rate, I want to get rid of that symlink stuff and allow VDR to "see" only one big video directory. Of course there may still be other volumes mounted on subdirectories of that video directory.
But then I would have to save recordings to those subdirectories on my own and VDR wouldn't even see that additional space. Means: The displayed disc usage would be unusable.
If it causes you trouble to keep that feature, then, of course, you should remove it, but I don't think that it really is obsolete nowadays. It still is the easiest way to add a second disc to a existing VDR installation without needing to move/copy/setup things for several hours.
Yours
Manuel