My Directv R10 has been acting strange lately, freezing up, rebooting, etc, and I have an impending sense of doom that a hard drive is about to crash. It has the factory installed hard drive and a second hard drive that I ordered from weaknees. I installed it a few years ago, and it's been working great up until now.

Over the years we've accumulated several hundred hours of tv that I'd like to preserve, and so I started looking around these boards for an idea on how to back everything up. I found the hinsdale instructions, and have read through them.

Question #1:
I'd like to copy everything to one back up drive, but upgrade configuration #6 says it's not possible with my Directv Tivo with two hard drives. Does that mean I would need two extra hard drives to serve as a back up?

Question #2:
Once they're backed up, is there a way to compress them so they'll fit on a dvd or cd? I know I won't be able to watch them on the dvd, but I thought I could use it since it has more storage capacity.

Question #3:
Looking through these forums, it doesn't look like it's possible to go through and pick and choose which programs to back up, but I thought I'd ask.

Of course, it seems to me the easiest way to do this would be to plug an external hard drive into the USB port in the back and copy it to that, but that's just too easy, right?