Sage deleted about 80 Gb of shows THAT I SHOULDN'T HAVE

[Berg]

Good evening, well it isn't ...

Just got home this evening and turned on my MVP to find out that for some unexplainable reason, my free recording space went from about 30 odd hours available to one hundred and forty odd.

That's strange ...

A quick check found that my show library which contained over 140 shows now only contains 27 !

For some reason, Sage deleted 90 hours of shows, mostly (if not all) on one of the two 320 Gb drives. I am running an undelete utility right now, but it seems like most shows will not be recoverable.

What happened ?!?!?

I suspect there is very little to do to recover the shows ... but this can't happen again.

Any one have any idea what happened ?

Thanks.

[GKusnick]

What's your evidence for thinking that Sage deleted the files? Maybe they got deleted by some other means, and then Sage, seeing that they were gone, deleted its database entries for them.

Check your system event log for disk errors, and try running some disk diagnostics on that drive to see if it's getting ready to fail.

Also if you have debug logging enabled in Sage, check your Sage logs to see why those database entries got deleted.

[Berg]

Thanks Greg, I appreciate that I may be jumping the gun, but ...

I looked at my system log and found no errors. So, could it be a hardware problem ... maybe, but I have a smart monitoring utility and have receive no alerts. The system hasn't registered any system errors.

So I assumed, and maybe incorrectly, that Sage decided to delete them.

This is a dedicated Sage server running on WinXP Pro with a very solid and up-to-date install. Aside, from the possible hardware error, Sage was the only logical reason I could/can see.

I don't know if debug is turned on. I am not even sure how to check. I guess I am off to read the manual.

The undelete utility was only able to recover a couple of shows. The vast majority of the shows were showing 0 byte as the size and could be recovered but they were not usable by Sage or another player.

This seems like an bump in the road I won't be able to resolve ... I just want to prevent it down the road, or built some resilience into the system.

So frustrating ...

Thanks for your help.

[Opus4]

Debug logging is explained here.

Did you have something like Norton Protected Recycle Bin, or whatever it is called, running? If so, disable it on any recording dirve because those types of recycle bin utilities can keep files from actually getting deleted, so the space isn't actually freed when they are deleted. Then, if SageTV needs to delete something in order to make room for more recordings, it ends up deleting a file, sees there still isn't room available, deletes another, etc.

- Andy

[Berg]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Did you have something like Norton Protected Recycle Bin, or whatever it is called, running?

- Andy

Nope. I could see that being a problem, but no. I really made that machine as simple as possible since it is used exclusively for Sage.

I'll go turn on debug logging and hope I never need it ;-)