whisky-dave wrote
Rod Speed wrote
whisky-dave wrote

Dunno, I don't bother with 2.5" drives, I buy
the 3.5" drives and 8TB drives most recently.

What do you actually need to back up ?

Its not for backup, thats the stuff recorded on the PVR that I havent
got around to watching. We do go thru our summer with less stuff
worth watching being broadcast than I want to watch so can watch
stuff that I hadn't got around to watching previously at that time.

I don't find that much worth recording,

I record everything I watch, dont watch anything live
except some election eve broadcasts and those are
recorded while I watch them live too. I do that so I can
watch it when I want to watch it, not when its being
broadcast and so I can skip the ads. We have two govt
operations, the equivalent of your BBC and one of them,
the SBS has commercial ads like the commercial channels
have, to pay for it. We dont have TV licenses anymore.

and most that I do record I've seen before and
when I have watched something I delete it.

I do too with most of what I watch. But until this year
I used to record entire blocks of the stuff I want to
watch on a particular channel and when I watch one
of the items, would have to edit the recorded file to
delete just the one I watched and usually didnt bother.
I now record each program in a separate file so its
now easy to delete what I have watched.

Of the 4 hours on TV I watched last night

I normally only watch a couple of hours a night, sometimes 3, hardly ever 4.

I recorded 3 hours of it then watched it all last night recorded last
night.

I watch the best stuff next evening, and more during the rest of the
week. The stuff I watch is mostly broadcast on Sunday night and there
is sometimes nothing worth recording on Thursday or Friday night.

Sure my tIvo is 74% full but I;ve had it 4 years or so and
never run out of space I;ve plenty on there I want to watch
mines a 500GB if I had 8TB I would record more crap

The 8TB drive is only half full and I got it 2 years ago now.

and I might spend more time watching crap
too , which is something I want to aviod.

You appear to watch twice as much as I do if your 4 hours is typical.

PLus there;s plenty of catchup channels here in the UK.

There are here too, but its nowhere near as convenient
to skip the ads with those. I mute the audio during the
ad, keep laying freecell pro which I do when watching
anything, have to keep an eye on the screen the video
is displayed on to see when to unmute the audio again.

With recorded stuff I just hit the one key to skip all the
ads with maybe another smaller jump or two for when
the ad break isnt always for the same amount of time.
Much more convenient than when using catchup.

And it can take months till I watch something
and it can have gone from the catchup by then.

I can pretty much watch any fools and horses episode
I want it's reperated over and over again, as is star trek
TNBG is on it's 3rd rerun this year IIRC, I don't really
need to record them.

I prefer to record them so I can watch it when it suits me.

I should really go thru the older stuff that I have never got around
to watching and likely never will watch, but those 8TB drives are so
****ing cheap that its not worth my time to save so little money.

I don;t find 8TB drives ****ing cheap,

My most recent one only cost me $130

they are about twice the price of 4TB

Thats bull****.

and I wouldnlt spend even half that to store stuff that'll be repeated
the follwing week or somethime day, or I can get from catchup.

Much more convenient to play it from the drive instead
of farting around checking when it will be broadcast
next or farting around with the stupid ads on catchup.

Some if it;s their job to backup data I can understadn but the average
home users, sure I back up pictures of my cat and gig's I go to but I
can't think of anything that would be seriously life changing.

I do take photos of what bits go with what device when I buy
something but that about all that would be a nuisance if I lost.
Dont use those photos much tho so not the end of the world
if I lost them.

I;d agree but most buy backup drives to back stuff up.

I do too but bigger for the PVR unwatched stuff too.