At some point yesterday, between mid-afternoon and 7PM, the boot drive on my Windows 7 based PVR just quit. Poof!

Luckily for me, I still had the previous boot drive with a Windows XP installation on it, complete with a working SageTV install. Missing only all my favorites (season pass) settings of the past year. I say "lucky" because this system is the only way to get TV in the house. This SageTV installation was also new enough that it supported a feature they released last year that reads TV show metadata directly from the recordings rather than relying on a central preference/data file. This allowed us to access all the recordings we had without issue.

About the biggest let-down was that by the time I noticed the issue it was close to 8pm. And by the time I got everything re-connected and booted, it was already almost 8:30. That means my wife missed 30 minutes of American Idol (only 1 decent performance) and Survivor. The internets will fix that last one.

It's going to be a bit of a PITA to recreate my favorites list and make sure I'm not missing anything. Mostly because I have to prune out a lot of older cruft that I'd already done on the newer SageTV install.

Today I'll dedicate two older 40GB PATA drives to a software mirror configuration, which will hold Windows 7 and SageTV.


I also want to run a repeating scheduled backup of a few files/folders, such as the SageTV installation/settings folder, which I'll copy over to my NAS. Are there any recommendations for setting this up? Especially useful would be something similar to Mac OS' Time Machine that gives me snapshots and updates only information that's changed.