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Notes on using external drives and networked volumes |
You can include external hard drives such as USB or Firewire drives, and even volumes on Macs networked to your own. However, there are some things to need to know. While these methods work perfectly and grant full functionality, it must be acknowledged that they are temporary workarounds until Elgato adds multiple drive support to EyeTV. As workarounds, there are limitations that must be recognized. The most significant is that it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you always mount volumes that contain EyeTV storage locations before using either program. If you link schedules and/or recordings from external drives or network volumes and then try to use EyeTV or iEye Captain when they are not mounted, it may cause errors. This only applies to the “master” archive, and to schedules and recordings you wish to remain visible in EyeTV For instance, you could have an iMac in your home office that does all the recording and archiving. If you choose to record to or keep recordings on a firewire drive, that drive should remain connected to the iMac and turned on. You may export compacted recordings to a third drive--- this you could disconnect when needed. Then, you could have a Mac Mini in your living room (with no EyeTV) connected to the iMac over the network, and set the EyeTV preferences on the Mini to pretend that the iMac’s main archive is also the Mini’s archive. The Mini could access all the recordings in the archives, and yet you could disconnect it and turn it off, without affecting anything on the master iMac. Particularly with EyeTV 1.x, if you must maintain archives on external drives that you disconnect, you may wish to develop a naming scheme that will make it apparent in the EyeTV Programs window which schedules and recordings belong to dismounted volumes. It is possible that you may be able to operate by making sure you never try to play or access these schedules or recordings while the volume is disconnected, but this method is unsupported and not recommended. EyeTV 2 is a lot smarter about handling missing files -- if you choose this workflow, I suggest you consider upgrading. Hard drives for larger archive space, and fast DVD burners and media have never been cheaper; there is no substitute for frequent editing, archiving & unloading of media. |