Feature recommendation - warning - very "out there"

[joesh]

I apologize in advance - I am going to suggest a feature, and to be honest, it is sort of a crazy feature ... perhaps one that nobody else would ever find useful but me ... so please bear with me ...

I save all of my sage TV shows across the network to a fileserver - sage justs saves everything onto a mapped drive. So far so good. The odd thing is, when that share ran out of space, sageTV just went ahead and deleted all TV shows in the share (!) - not just enough to record the next show, but fully _all_ TV show files in the base of the share.

So here is my crazy feature suggestion: What if you changed sageTV so that it _didn't_ randomly erase peoples data for no reason ?

Again, I realize this is a really "out there" concept - the notion that the software you sell _wouldn't_ just randomly trash a few hundred gigabytes of my data is a really unique idea ... but think about it for a while, and perhaps it will make sense to you.

Again - perhaps I am the only person that thinks the way that I do, and thinks that perhaps my applications shouldn't randomly delete my data for no reason ... but then again, perhaps not ... maybe there are a few others like me out there - others that think that maybe, just maybe, software we are running _shouldn't_ just randomly delete hundreds of gigs of data for no reason ...

Let me know what you think! If this idea is too crazy to even understand from my short description, let me know and I will try to flesh it out further.

Have a great day!

[Deadbolt]

too crazy, not needed

[mlbdude]

Most likely what happend is the network drive went unavailable for a extended period of time. In that case Sage would delete the shows when the drive came back up by default (this behavior can be changed). I could see Sage giving you space errors if its storage drive was unavailable.

[joesh]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Most likely what happend is the network drive went unavailable for a extended period of time. In that case Sage would delete the shows when the drive came back up by default (this behavior can be changed). I could see Sage giving you space errors if its storage drive was unavailable.

No, that is not what happened - the network share had no loss of connectivity at any point (as evidenced by streaming music being run from it, without interruption, from another system).

I did indeed get a space error on the system where sageTV was running (as expected, since it did run out of space), and _also_ it did delete all the shows.

Can you please explain what possible purpose there would be behind the behavior you describe above (a drive being unaccessible, and sageTV deleting everything on it as soon as it becomes accessible again) ? I really would be fascinated to know how that would help anyone...

Also, where do I turn that "feature" off - even though my network share did not lose connectivity, perhaps turning that off would have helped anyway....

thansk.

[mlbdude]

When a file (or files on a drive) is no longer assessable to Sage for a period of time at some point it has to assume you deleted it manually behind the scenes and Sage needs to clean up its database. It really has no choice.

Then when Sage is able to see the drive again it finds all this junk there that it does not recognize. Since the junk is in its space it uses to record, it deletes those file right away.

There is a property in the Sage.Properties file called "use_errant_dir". By setting this to true it will still delete the data from the Sage database, but it will move the files to a sub-directory under the video directory called errant. It will then only delete the files as space is needed.

To avoid the space errors (but not the shows being deleted) I would recommend having some space available on the server for Sage to use for recordings.

[Opus4]

Is this SageTV or SageTV Recorder (since this is in the recorder forum)? And, if it is Recorder, does it work the same way as SageTV regarding file deletions, errant dir, etc?

- Andy

[mlbdude]

Good catch Opus. I could guess yes but I don't know for sure. All my responses are defiantly from my experience with SageTV. They do share their internal parts but something could be different.

[joesh]

Ok, I understand. I suppose a better solution would be to just run a cron job:

chmod 0700 /my/tv/directory/*.mpg

every 12 hours so that sage can't touch the stuff even if it wants to. What would the ramifications of that be ? What if I did _not_ have the errant dir option turned on, and sage cleared its DB, and then discovered those files there, and _couldn't_ delete them ?

And also, if the DB is tied on a one-to-one basis to the files in the dir, then why not just have the files in the dir themselves be the DB ? ANd just not have a DB at all ? If they are there, they're there ... if not, they're not.

[Opus4]

I only asked because I once answered something here & got it wrong since I didn't see the forum name when looking at the list of new postings.

(I don't know that you were wrong... but like you said, there could be differences.)

I was wondering if free space is seen differently on a network drive somehow & it kept deleting files since it couldn't get the proper answer.

OR, if the files were deleted & simply put into the recycle bin, sometimes free space isn't reported accurately & therefore it still kept deleting files... which had little/no effect on the free space reading. So -- is the recycle bin turned off for this dir, or drive, or at least for mpegs?

- Andy

[Opus4]

Originally posted by joesh
And also, if the DB is tied on a one-to-one basis to the files in the dir, then why not just have the files in the dir themselves be the DB ? ANd just not have a DB at all ? If they are there, they're there ... if not, they're not.

Some of us have desired that for a while -- would make it easier to move or rename files... but it is all currently stored in wiz.bin (for SageTV).

- Andy

[nethawk]

A couple of observations. If he's talking about a cron job I imagine the fileserver is some sort of Linux box running Samba. As such, there's no recycle bin or any such nonsense. It should also be noted that it didn't RANDOMLY delete your files, I'd in fact bet you could replicate the condition by running out of space on the fileserver. Not that it makes it any better, but still.

<insert soap box> </insert soap box>

My belief on the actual problem from a logical nature is a problem of intent for use. PVR's are in general designed so that you may record a show when you can't otherwise watch it, play it back later, and then delete it. Sage was likely not designed as to hold show data forever, thus why it would delete files when it needs room. The settings MLBDude recommended should get around the problem (kudos to Frey for thinking ahead,) but it may freak since it's a network drive anyway. NOTE: I'm not really sure on all this in specific regard to Sage, just making a general observation.