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And because it's a UNIX (Free BSD) based system you have the power of Symbolic Links at your disposal, so instead of creating a cron job to move the recorded material to your external drive, simply map a Symbolic Link to the drive with

ln -s /path/to/original/ /path/to/linkName see Understanding Symbolic Links

Where /path/to/original/ will be the mount point in the filesystem of your external drive, in a Linux system that would be /media/externaldrive and /path/to/linkName would be somewhere in your home directory.

Then all you need to do is point your DVR application at the linkname, whcih will be in your home directory and as far as the software is concerned it will be writing to somewhere on the local hard drive, not an external one.

Using symbolic links the recordings would always be on the preferred HDD, as far as the software is concerned.

You are thinking in terms of how Windows does things. On Linux/Unix there is no such thing as an different drive. it's merely another node in the filesystem.

But the important thing is that in a Linux/Unix (and therefore Mac) filesystem there is no such things as an external HDD there is only a mounted filesystem, which is integrated into the root "/" filesystem, and is therefore, as far as the Operating system (and therefore applications) is concerned is just another directory in the filesystem. This is radically different from how it's done in Windows, and requires that you reorient your thinking regarding what you are dealing with, and what the limitations are. The Limitations imposed upon you by Windows don't exist, and to take advantage of what you have requires a shift in thinking. You no longer have mounted Devices (ie an external hard drive) you have mounted filesystems, which are considerably more flexible... as I explained when discussing Linux.

A possible solution to the filesizes, I don't know if Apple will allow this, but on Linux it's possible to mount a special compressed filesystem using FUSE, it would be possible to effectively double or even quadruple the terrabyte HDD.

I have to borrow a Mac, so it will be a day or so before I can give you the drum on what to do, if the Mac techies are worth their money they will understand, or may even have a GUI way to do it. One would have thought with all it's user frriendliness that the Mac would have a simple drag and drop solution to creating Symlinks, like Ubuntu (and most desktop Linuxes) has.

In Ubuntu open file manager locate file or directory, right mouse click on directory, select "Make Link" from the context menu, drag the icon named "Link to Directory/FileName" to preferred easy to access place, drop icon, rename icon to whatever name floats your boat.

In Mandriva open file manager locate file or directory, drag the file or Directory you want to link to to the place that provides an easy to access for you, drop the file or directory, respond to the small popup context menu which asks Do you want to "Move nameofFileorFolder" "Copy namofFileorFolder" "Make a link to nameofFileorFolder" by selecting "Make a Link....."

You are discovering the one reason I personally dislike Macs (and that includes their iPhone).... It is that Macs are more proprietary than Windows, as both the software and the hardware are controlled by Apple. Not that Microsoft doesn't exert an inordinate amount of control of the hardware, at least from the aspect of controlling what goes onto said hsrdware by default, namely the Windows OS... all of the big name OEMs have agreements with Microsoft, and special deals that lock them down to providing and advertising only Windows, not even Dell, it seems can escape that... you have to know where to find the Dell Linux deals, and the last time I looked even those pages has "Dell recommends Windows Vista ....." as if they are ashamed of having spent all the money and taken the time and trouble of building their Linux offerings, and would rather you went to a different page and ordered something else. On the other hand, the hardware doesn't belong to Microsoft, so replacing windows with Linux doesn't void the warranty, as it does replacing OSX with Linux on Apples hardware.