MFS Tools 3.2

Announcing the release of MFS Tools 3.2!

"MFS Tools 1.0 was evolutionary in the TiVo upgrade process. MFS Tools 2.0 may prove to be revolutionary." I'll let you can choose your own adjective for MFS Tools 3.2.

Highlights

• Supports Series 1 through Roamio (and perhaps beyond).
• Backwards compatible with MFS Tools v1 and v2.
• Supports 8 TB on Premiere (perhaps more, tested with dual 4 TB drives).
• Supports 8 TB on Roamio (perhaps more, tested with dual 4 TB drives).
• Backup and restore (or drive-drive using mfscopy) single or dual drive setups, and preserve recordings if you choose.
• Supersize the drive, which can be reversed even after GSOD.
• You can include the alternate boot/kernel/root partitions (useful for customized partition layouts).
• Automatically includes required loopset files (you no longer need to use the -f flags during backup) when not including recordings (truncated backup)
• Automatically prunes recordings when a truncated backup is done (sets the MFS flags to cleanup, so the unit will scan objects on startup)
• Works on drives that have been marked for cleanup (GSOD).
• Creates a new MFS structure, so drives that have been expanded by adding pairs can be consolidated to just two pairs, just like the original.
• Restore to drives smaller than the original.

Overview
MFS Tools v3.2 is a set of utilities that allow one to backup/restore/copy/supersize a TiVo drive, without losing recordings, and to expand recording space to take advantage of larger drives. Additionally, there are options that allow more advanced features and finer grain control over the TiVo drive. For example, there are options to revalidate the drive to the Linux kernel, so the partitions can be mounted or copied. The ability to increase/decrease swap, var, SQLite partition sizes on restore. Limit the amount of used space of the drive, limit media partition size, add app/media partition sets, convert between 32-bit and 64-bit MFS layouts, etc, etc, etc. Please take the time to review all of the utilities and their options to fully appreciate what the tools have to offer.

Thanks
A special thanks to Tiger, the original pioneer of MFS. And to all those that contribute here and on other sites that have helped me get the most out of my TiVo units.

History (unverified)
Tiger released the original closed source project in 2001, followed by 2.0 in 2002. In 2004, he released the source code under GPL, and made it available on sourceforge, and announced that he had no plans to continue work on it. He hen returned for a three month period in 2005 and a two month period in 2008 to work on a major update to version 3, with some ambitious new functionality and 64-bit MFS support for the TiVo HD. It has remained in this untested, almost functional, but overlooked state since then.

I received a some anonymous patches that fixed a few bugs, added Premier handling, and got things mostly working one. Since then, I've refined the Premiere support, added Roamio support, added some new utilities, deprecated a few options and added a few more, and cleaned up and debugged the code a bit.

Although there are several new tools, features, options, etc., available in 3.2, there was a fundamental change in the the way the MFS is handled. A simplified explanation is that in v1, the MFS is treated as a whole, and the entire structure is duplicated based on the used blocks. In v3, the inodes and data is copied individually, and during restore the MFS structure is recreated, the inodes and data blocks are allocated, and the inode and data is copied to the new locations.

The downside is that v3 backup/restore is not quite as fast as v1. The upside is that the MFS Media Partitions can now be re-sized, which is a pretty big advantage. Because v1 copied all MFS pairs, the number of times a drive could be backed/restored and then expanded to take advantage of additional disk space was limited. With v3, the restore process creates a drive with only two MFS app/data pairs, just like the original drive, no matter how many pairs the original drive had. And yes, you can now restore to a smaller drive than the original drive (provided the smaller drive has enough space for the recordings or you truncate it).

Notes
Every effort has been made to keep these tools as robust as possible. I have done limited testing (confirmed boot/operation, but not filled drives to capacity) on units from Series 1 through Roamio. The tools can still backup/restore using the original v1 backup format, and should work with existing backups.

I have deprecated several options, and will probably deprecate more to reduce the number of options for novice users. Some of the deprecated options (and additional debug options) will still be available with custom builds.

I have only tested with drives up to 4 TB, but there's been mention of Roamios supporting larger drives with 20.4.6 or later. I was able to setup a Premiere with 8 TB (dual 4 TB drives), but had to limit the media partitions to 2 TB max. This unit passed a forced MFS fsfix scan (GSOD) without issue.

Todo
I still have a few things I would like to add, such as adding SW version, original swap/var/db size to the backup header (extrainfo). I would also like to do some testing with larger drives and additional units.

Donations
My efforts in this project are voluntary and provided free of charge. I am considering accepting donations for additional hardware such as larger drives and a raid board, so let me know if you are interested in donating.

Also, feel free to donate time to the project. Documentation and usage examples are my least favorite things to work on, so any help would be appreciated.

Attachment
Please go to sourceforge for the latest release.