Suggestions

[jackal]

Hi All

Me once again
Just wondering how many of you use the suggestions system on your tivo and automatically record tivo suggested programs.

I have a question about mine, for some reason it has suggested all kids shows.
I have started thumbing down these shows but its a long process.
Do you know how it actaully works out the suggestions

Thanks

Luke

[Darren King]

Hi Luke

You've pretty much answered your own question. The TiVo knows little about your likes and dislikes at first so it records lots. This is why you have to give it ideas with the thumbs up and down buttons.

Of course if you do not like this feature you can turn it off in the preferences on-screen menu, but then you may miss out on it recording something you may like!

If you are worried about it chewing up hard disk space then don't. It will delete suggestions before anything else, and as the hard disk gets more full it will record less and less suggestions to the point where it will not record any if there is no room if you have not deleted any save until I delete (green dot) or marked for auto deletion (yellow dot) programs.

[pjpete]

Just on this, has anyone worked out how to backup these TU's and TD's yet? Pain to go through it all again when you re-image a disk.

[petestrash]

If you backup the full image with your dirve in a PC using mfsbackup eg.

mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

This will include your thumbs ratings.

So will dd if copying to another drive. eg.

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k

But as for backing up like you can do with season passes, that is not practical.

The values recorded are useless with any other TiVo as they are specific to that machines software only. Any new install will use different values.

With a bit of luck the way 1.6.2 has been designed, there should be no need to fully re-image drives again when updating versions. So this shouldn't be an issue.

If your worried about your system, it wouldn't hurt to do a full backup once in a while.

Peter.