Sage deleting watched shows way too quickly

[BrettS]

I'm a new Sage user and I have it set to do intellegent recording, so my recording drive is full all the time. There are a number of people in my household and we like to watch the same shows, but we don't always get to watch them together. Unfortunately we've been finding that a lot of our favorites aren't there when we go to watch them. What I've discovered is that when the first person watches the show, the 'watched' flag gets set (of course). Unfortunately Sage seems to be deleting shows with the 'watched' flag set very quickly... often just hours after the show was first watched.

We like the intellegent recording feature, so I don't want to turn that off, but I would rather have it delete unwatched intellegent recording shows before it deletes watched favorites. Is there any way configure sage to do this? Alternately, is there a way to prevent Sage from automatically setting the 'watched' flag when a show is watched? I know we can manually turn it off, but several people in my household are not very technologically literate and would not be able to do that, or at least not consistantly.

For what it's worth, this only seems to be happening with favorites and not with manual recordings... I've got several watched manual recordings that have been there for a long time without being automatically deleted.

Thanks much,
Brett

[GKusnick]

My suggestion would be to turn off auto-deletion on your favorites and do the deletion manually after everyone has had a chance to watch them.

Manual recordings are never deleted automatically; you must delete them manually. (See Appendix C of the manual.)

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

My suggestion would be to turn off auto-deletion on your favorites and do the deletion manually after everyone has had a chance to watch them.

I think that's exactly what I needed, but here's a follow up question. Is there any way to configure the default settings for setting up new favorites? I went through and manually changed the 30 or so favorites that we already have set up, but as I mentioned before, I can't trust the other people who will be using Sage to change this option every time they set up a favorite (frankly, it was an accomplishment to be able to teach them how to set up a favorite with just the default settings).

Thanks again,
Brett

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by BrettS

Is there any way to configure the default settings for setting up new favorites?

Yes; it's part of the unsupported extra features described in this thread.

[Fuzzy]

And you really only want to set that option on the favorites that are watched by multiple houshold members. You don't want it keeping everything forever, or you might run into the risk of new recordings not getting recorded.

In the end, though, more space is always a great solution...

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

And you really only want to set that option on the favorites that are watched by multiple houshold members. You don't want it keeping everything forever, or you might run into the risk of new recordings not getting recorded.

Actually, I keep autodelete turned off for all of my favorites, and just rely on deleting them manually when I'm done with them. The pop-up deletion dialog at the end of playback makes this fairly painless. That way I know nothing's going to disappear on me unexpectedly.

[src666]

We just hit "Clear Watched" when we are done with a show that others want to watch. Prevents deletion, and makes it easy for everyone to find the new shows.

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Yes; it's part of the unsupported extra features described in this thread.

Thanks. I just enabled the extra features and set the default favorite options... that should work out well for me.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

In the end, though, more space is always a great solution...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but more space won't help in my case because I have intellegent recording turned on (and I don't want to turn it off). Sage has 2TB available for recordings now and even if I gave it another 2TB the intellegent recording would fill that within a few days and I'd be right back where I am now.

Originally Posted by src666

We just hit "Clear Watched" when we are done with a show that others want to watch. Prevents deletion, and makes it easy for everyone to find the new shows.

I realize that's a potential solution, but as I said above, the problem is that I can't rely on several people who would be watching the shows to clear that flag every time they finished watching something. In my case, at least, turning off auto delete on the favorites is a much better solution.

I did limit it to a max of 7 episodes of each favorite (with a few exceptions for some shows), so that will give people plenty of time to catch up on their favorite shows if they get behind, yet still prevent the favorites from totally filling up the disk. This is basically the way the Tivo we used to have worked, so people are used to it behaving this way anyway.

Thanks again for the suggestions

Brett

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by BrettS

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but more space won't help in my case because I have intellegent recording turned on (and I don't want to turn it off). Sage has 2TB available for recordings now and even if I gave it another 2TB the intellegent recording would fill that within a few days and I'd be right back where I am now.

Sage will delete the intelligent recordings before it deletes favorites (whether the favorites are watched or not). So even if IR fills up the storage, it won't necessarily mean anything as far as whether favs get deleted early or not.

[BrettS]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sage will delete the intelligent recordings before it deletes favorites (whether the favorites are watched or not). So even if IR fills up the storage, it won't necessarily mean anything as far as whether favs get deleted early or not.

That's definitely not what I'm seeing and why I posted this message. My recordings storage is full and consists of about equal amounts of favorites and intelligent recordings (with a few manual recordings thrown in there). As I said above, within a few hours of a favorite getting watched it will be auto deleted, even though there are hundreds of intelligent recordings that could have been deleted instead. Unwatched favorites will remain, but as soon as that watched flag gets set the recording goes away pretty quickly. Is this not working the way it should?

Thanks again,
Brett

[Opus4]

As mentioned in the first reply, above, please refer to Appendix C of the SageTV PDF manual for info about deletion priority. Watched recordings have lower priority than IR.

- Andy

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Opus4

As mentioned in the first reply, above, please refer to Appendix C of the SageTV PDF manual for info about deletion priority. Watched recordings have lower priority than IR.

- Andy

Wow.. i guess I misread that. That really should be configurable (not that I'd ever use IR).