Lost 120GB of recordings

[Gendalia]

Because .13 wasn't recording things I told it to record, I fiddled with enabling & disabling Intelligent Recording and restarted sage between attempts... Because of cleanup on exit, I'd guess, about 120GB of stuff that had been favorites but were no longer (because I no longer get the channels they are on) along with a large batch of other stuff I kind of wanted to watch all disappeared. It is just TV, so it's not an overwhelming loss, but maybe before wholesale cleaning of half the disk space it should enquire.

I've reverted to .12, because crashing on delete is somewhat annoying, and focus follows mouse is fairly useless and occasionally annoying when the mouse isn't very useful for navigation in the first place. Not recording when I tell it to is also annoying, and no IR nor favorites have recorded since I installed .13, which makes it a fairly pointless beta for me. (It took a few days to notice it wasn't recording anything, I had lots of other tv to watch til it was deleted.)

[gplasky]

The current workaround for the delete-crash is to choose the file you want to delete and have it playing in the preview window. As long as the file you want to delete is playing Sage won't crash.
Make sure you put Sage to sleep and it won't record when you don't tell it to. If you leave Sage up and finish watching TV it still thinks you're watching TV and continues to record.
All my favorites are recording fine. I'm not using IR so I can't comment on that. I don't think anyone is having issues like that.

In the release notes:

NOTES: Changed behavior when Intelligent Recording is disabled so that it will continually delete the files it records that you didn't request; rather than waiting until it exits.

So it wasn't your cleanup on exit. The behavior was changed for .13. If you were warned when these files are deleted you get get a warning every time you switched the channel. Need to read the readme carefully and understand what it's telling you. If you hadn't disabled IR you wouldn't have lost your files. A heads up for everyone.

Gerry

[salsbst]

I'm having trouble understanding why this new IR behavior nets out to be a good thing. I think we have our case for why it is a bad thing right here in this thread.... but what's the upside that merits the occasional loss of 120 GB of shows?

[gplasky]

I think this was done to reduce the clutter of files in the directory. People that channel surf were finding all kinds of files in there. And if you keep Sage up all the time the "clean up files on exit" setting wouldn't help. I'm not sure how the upgrade was done. Maybe this occurred before copying the backup of the wiz.bin file. Maybe it was a straight upgrade. I wouldn't think this behavior would be expected if Sage knew about these 120GB of recordings. I would think it would just clean up misc. files that were sheduled/favorites/manual recordings. Now if these 120GB of files were just files that were left over from watching the shows then this would happen based on the new behavior. This may be a bug. But I don't think I'll volunteer to test.

Gerry

[SprDtyF350]

I like the new way that the files are deleted. We have 2 MediaMVP boxes in the house and they used to show every little piece of everything Sage recorded in there menu. Now that it gets deleted only the shows I really want there show up.

Randy

[Cayars]

Yes, it is much nicer now. This was a deal breaker for me previously and now I'm pretty happy. I'd still like to be able to select a folder or location to to record to however.

Carlo

[Gendalia]

Originally posted by gplasky
I think this was done to reduce the clutter of files in the directory. People that channel surf were finding all kinds of files in there. And if you keep Sage up all the time the "clean up files on exit" setting wouldn't help. I'm not sure how the upgrade was done. Maybe this occurred before copying the backup of the wiz.bin file. Maybe it was a straight upgrade. I wouldn't think this behavior would be expected if Sage knew about these 120GB of recordings. I would think it would just clean up misc. files that were sheduled/favorites/manual recordings. Now if these 120GB of files were just files that were left over from watching the shows then this would happen based on the new behavior. This may be a bug. But I don't think I'll volunteer to test.

Gerry

Sage knew about the 120GB of recordings. It was a straight upgrade, and seemed fine for several days. My display of recorded shows (categorized) went from several pages long to two shows in the space of very few minutes.

Like I said, this isn't a disaster, just inconvenient.

My problem wasn't recording all the time, my problem was it not recording at all, even "Watch now" didn't work from the LiveTV guide, and it hadn't recorded any of our favorites since the upgrade, nor the things I expect IR to record. If it'd been recording anything at all as I'd told it to do, I'd not have been fiddling with the IR setting.

[gplasky]

Could the disk have been full? That would be the only reason I could think of that Sage wouldn't record? Maybe it was full and for some reason Sage didn't know about it or generate an error? Strange. So you're saying when you picked LiveTV the screen would be blank and nothing was playing?

Gerry

[Gendalia]

Originally posted by gplasky
Could the disk have been full? That would be the only reason I could think of that Sage wouldn't record? Maybe it was full and for some reason Sage didn't know about it or generate an error? Strange. So you're saying when you picked LiveTV the screen would be blank and nothing was playing?

Gerry

I had about 32GB free. When I picked LiveTV, the most I could get it to do was go into the info screen, if I didn't go into the info screen my trying to select a show had no effect. Picking "Watch Now" on the info screen had no effect, I stayed on the info screen. Picking "Record" had no effect either.

[mbrown3]

Yeah, I had the same experience with it...apparently the UI is non-functioning as yet, so mouse support is thus far nonexistent. I guess unless you're really into keystroke commands, tough luck (and I'm not at all into them). I reverted to 1.4 to wait it out...

[Gendalia]

I use mouse, keyboard and remote to control Sage, depending. I tried each of them when I was trying to watch LiveTV.

I have, in general, been relatively happy with the betas, and have upgraded to each of them immediately. The latest one just wasn't working for me.

[Brett]

Originally posted by salsbst
but what's the upside that merits the occasional loss of 120 GB of shows?

Uhh....its beta software and it was in the release notes.

Happy as ever,
SlimD

[Deadbolt]

It would be nice to have a feature that deletes all the pieces of channel surfing files but keeps all IR, manual recordings, and favorites. Right now, if you use IR this feature doesn't help any.

Question, how are imported shows handled? They weren't told to record...does it just delete all your imported files?

Deadbolt

[Gendalia]

I lost nothing I'd moved to library, and nothing I'd imported.

[salsbst]

Originally posted by SlimD
Uhh....its beta software and it was in the release notes.

Happy as ever,
SlimD

Right.

But what I'm saying: if this is a feature that was operating as designed, then perhaps it is doing more harm than good.

It now seems less clear that this was the result of this new feature operating as designed.

[nielm]

To me it seems like the following has happened...

Gendalia in the past had set up some favourites or manual reccordings and had recorded 120Gb of shows. For whatever reason he/she then removed these favourites...

The recorded shows now appear as (possibly watched) normal TV files -- which are the first to be deleted in any case...

Sage 2.0.13 comes along, sees lots of TV files that are not favourites, manual recordings or anything like that, assumes they were watched unrequested 'liveTV' files (what else could they be!), and with its new behaviour starts deleting them...

Note elsewhere on this forum, popple are complaining like mad that when waching TV, Sage fills up the hard disk with rubbish, which (I assume) is why this new deleting feature is added).

The only problem I can see is that the warning in the release notes was too vague... It should have been:

NOTES: Changed behavior when Intelligent Recording is disabled so that it will continually delete the files it records that you didn't request; rather than waiting until it exits.
WARNING: This means that if you dont use IR, any recordings that are not Manual recordings (red) or faviourites (white) will be deleted when SageTV starts.
To avoid this, make sure any recordings you want to keep are set as either favourites or manual recodings, or added to bideo library...

[salsbst]

The problem I see is that, just because you no longer want something recorded as a favorite, doesn't mean that you want SageTV to go deleting it willy nilly.

I am a fan of the old system, and this new system (if it behaves as you guess) seems like it has gone way too far in the other direction.

Ideally a show would be marked as [favorite|IR|live|other?] when recorded, and nothing that we do subsequent to that would change that marking.

[Gendalia]

Originally posted by nielm
To me it seems like the following has happened...

Gendalia in the past had set up some favourites or manual reccordings and had recorded 120Gb of shows. For whatever reason he/she then removed these favourites...

The recorded shows now appear as (possibly watched) normal TV files -- which are the first to be deleted in any case...

That seems fairly accurate. Not watched in this case, but that's not important.

The only problem I can see is that the warning in the release notes was too vague... It should have been:

That's reasonable, With "don't use IR" maybe expanded to "don't use or disable IR".

[Gendalia]

Originally posted by salsbst
The problem I see is that, just because you no longer want something recorded as a favorite, doesn't mean that you want SageTV to go deleting it willy nilly.

I am a fan of the old system, and this new system (if it behaves as you guess) seems like it has gone way too far in the other direction.

Ideally a show would be marked as [favorite|IR|live|other?] when recorded, and nothing that we do subsequent to that would change that marking.

This would be nice.

I had about 30 episodes of a show recorded that are now gone. I hadn't watched them yet, the ones I had watched were moved into the library. This is the one that I most miss, since I don't get that channel anymore. I had removed the show's marking as a favorite because my husband had complained about all the favorites that we no longer would be able to get being the majority of the pages of favorites we had. So we removed the shows that we can't get from favorites about a month ago. It certainly had unexpected results.

As someone has pointed out, this is a beta, and I should probably be expecting betas to swallow my computer and spit it out in pieces. I think this is fair warning that maybe some refinement is necessary.

[gplasky]

Maybe it just needs to clean out files smaller than a certain size. I would think a minimum recording would be 1/2 hour. Worse quality is fair which is 1 GB an hour. If it just cleaned out files less than 500mb (or whatever size works best) it would keep the small channel-surfing files out of there but not touch any files recorded by live TV but not yet watched. (Or mybe it is just a bug in this first implementation.)

Gerry