Help! Disappearing recordings.

[Joe Mama]

I love Sage TV but this can't go on. My recordings are disappearing. A few weeks ago I put a second TV tuner card in my computer. It's an Haupauge 150 and the first one was a 250. Up until then, I have had no problems with Sage TV, other than some disconnects from my Media MVP. I am using Sage 2.7 with Cayars 1.7 (I think) as my UI and I think it's also great.
I added the second card because I wanted to record the 24 hour marathon of last season's episodes of 24 on A&E and needed to be able to record two shows at the same time. At the time, I also added another hard drive to one of my other computers and shared out a portion of it so that I would have a place to record all those episodes.
Well, everything recorded fine and over the next week or two I watched all of the episodes. I purposely didn't delete them because one of the guys at work was also interested in seeing them. Then, they disappeared. I probably didn't notice for a day or two but the next time I looked in the directory they were just gone. I'm a computer tech by trade and recovering lost data is just part of the job but this stuff was gone. I tried a number of data recovery tools but the only traces I found were some of the commercial skip data files. I thought that I was losing my mind. Forty gig of data does not usually evaporate with out a trace.
After I did some checking around in the forums without finding much that relates to this problem, other than some theories on corrupted wiz.bin files, I just chalked it up as one of those things and started copying the files I wanted to keep over to another directory. Well, that didn't really work. I've continued losing files, seemingly at random. Yesterday, about fifty gigs of files spontaneously disappeared and my data reovery tools have only been able to find about 20 gigs of it. I really need to know what the heck is happening here. I don't really see any pattern to this. It doesn't wipe out all of the files in the shared directory, just some. It doesn't seem to do it by date and it will take some episodes but not all in the same show folder. This is driving me nuts, please help.

[waynedunham]

I'm sure others will chime in with probably better ideas, but I'd suggest a few things. It is probably something on your system since there aren't tons of complaints about lost recordings. Either in your Sage setup or some utility that's deleting/shredding your files.

Go into setup and make sure you haven't set the directories for the videos to have some bizarre usage rule, i.e. leaving most of the drive free so Sage deletes the files on you when it does housekeeping.

At least until you can find out what's causing it, go back to the default STV and turn off any commercial skip detection.

If the files stop disappearing then add the non-stock STV's and addins one at a time until you find the culprit.

Something I just saw in another thread when I did a search. Do you have Norton protected recycle bin? Someone had a problem with that deleting their files several months ago.
I used to be a Norton Util fan, but with each update/upgrade the system got slower and slower and more bizarre things started cropping up. Now I tell people to throw it as far from their computer as they can. Resource hog, and interferes with the operation of too many other apps. Norton AV isn't too bad, but it's all the other utils that cause lots of problems.

Do you have any automatic "cleanup" utilies that periodically go out and clean up things like your internet cache files, etc? Maybe that's seeing those files as something it should get rid of?

Since the files don't even appear with several recovery utilies I'd suspect Norton File Shredder (or whatever it's called), or some other app that's designed to remove all evidence of a file when it's deleted.

How were the files recorded? Manual, Favorite, Intelligent Record?

Did a quick search on the net and there are several viruses out there that will target MPEG files and delete and/or infect them. I did a search with "virus deletes mpeg" and it came up with many, many hits at reputable anti-virus sites.

Here's just a couple.......

From Symantec W32.nopir.c

From F-Secure Loveletter.p

There are also several which infect an Mpeg so maybe your AV software is deleting the files?

I hope you can track down where the culprit is.

[Joe Mama]

Thanks for the suggestions and the quick response Wayne. I'm going to test for all of the things that you mentioned. In the meantime, here's some more detail.
The system that the files are disappearing off of is a fairly clean one. I have Symantec AV running but no other utilities or file clean up programs. I suspect that the files aren't recoverable because they are being written over by new, large files and as soon as you lose the begining of an mpeg file, it's pretty much toast.

Go into setup and make sure you haven't set the directories for the videos to have some bizarre usage rule, i.e. leaving most of the drive free so Sage deletes the files on you when it does housekeeping.

I have one directory that's on the Sage server box set to leave 1gig free and the other one thats shared on the network (where the files are diappearing from) set to use 80 gig of space. Cayars reports the total amount of drivespace available. I have not run up to the 80 gig when the files get deleted. BTW, is the listed recording directories order the order in which it will look to the drives for free space to record?

At least until you can find out what's causing it, go back to the default STV and turn off any commercial skip detection.

I disabled the commercial skip yesterday and have files missing today. I haven't tried going back to the default STV but I will try that tonight.

I'm running a full system scan to check for viruses, but my job makes me pretty paranoid about that sort of thing, so I think my system is clean.

Does anyone have a concise explanation of under what circumstances Sage will delete files? I don't mean accidentally. My guess is that it has some reason to think the files are supposed to be deleted. It's just not telling me what those circumstances are.

[Opus4]

In the v2.2 manual, see Appendix C: Managing Recording Files, starting on p. 189, for info on how SageTV determines where to save a recording and when it will delete files. (This section was updated in the v3 manual.)

My first guess would be Norton Protected Recycle Bin -- deleted files will remain on the drive, messing with the free space reported to SageTV. It will look to you as if there is plenty of free space, but the OS is reporting to SageTV that those fiels are taking up space, so it deletes more recordings in an attempt to make room for a new recording.

- Andy

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by Joe Mama

I have one directory that's on the Sage server box set to leave 1gig free and the other one thats shared on the network (where the files are diappearing from) set to use 80 gig of space. Cayars reports the total amount of drivespace available. I have not run up to the 80 gig when the files get deleted. BTW, is the listed recording directories order the order in which it will look to the drives for free space to record?

Ahhh, I don't recall you mentioning that the files were only disappearing from the network share. You say it's "shared on the network", is the directory ON the Sage box, another machine, or some kind on stand-alone network storage (Ximeta, Infrant NAS, etc)?
If it's on another PC then make sure you don't have Norton Protected Recycle bin, or any of the other things mentioned in my message running on that PC. The other machine doesn't care what Sage wants, it's going to follow the direction of whatever it is running.(i.e. Norton recycle, av software, etc)
I built my machine with a large amount of disk space so I haven't had to mess with network shares for storage yet. I'm sure there are others who might be able to share some insights with their setups.

Also it may help us to point you in the right direction if you give more details on your setup. Give details on each PC that's part of the Sage system. Something like this.....

Sage Server
Sage version
STV
Comskip y/n
Video Dir
AV Software, Utiliies running
etc, etc

Network PC
OS and Version
Folder(s) shared and being used by Sage
AV Software, Utilities running
etc, etc

[Joe Mama]

Here's more detail:

Sage Server: ver. 2.27
Sage Client: ver. 2.27
STV: problems were on Cayars17.stv, now default
Comskip: was on, now off
Video Dir: E:\timeshifting, mapped network drive I:\
Utilities etc: Zone Alarm, Symantec anti-virus9.0 corporate edition, no protected recycle bin. Daemon Tools on netowork PC. X1file search index on host, vnc on host. Were both on when things were fine. Nothing new since problem.

PC Details: Server.
XP Pro SP2
Athlon XP 1300+
768MB RAM
GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card.
Creative SB Live! with Live Drive sound card
C:\ 40gig
E:\ 40gig

Network PC
XP Pro SP2
Athlon 64 3500+
Radeon 800XL
1gig RAM
C:\ 80gig PATA
E:\ 40gig PATA
F:\ 40gig PATA
G:\ Daemon Tools virtual CD-ROM drive.
H:\ 250gig SATA sharing 2 directories. No read/write limitations

1 Media MVP on network using Sage client running on Server.

Wife's laptop on network connected through wireless access point. All other machines wired to 4 port SMC wireless routher.

I think that's all the relevant info. If you need clarification, just ask.

[waynedunham]

If I recall you were saying the files were only disappearing from the mapped net
work drive "I", correct?

[Joe Mama]

Yes, I believe so. The recording drive on the server is nearly full. It does have the space to record another show, but the recordings seem to default to the larger, networked drive now.
I have set the STV back to default and turned off comskip. I don't think that I've lost anything since. Unfortunately, because the loss of files is semi random, that could just be luck. I'll keep fiddling with things to see if I can nail it down though.
My final solution will probably be to finally upgrade the server by putting the hand me down CPU, motherboard and hard drives I have from upgrading my other systems. It's just that I hate change. Something always goes wrong, or in this case... wronger.