Sage just deleted about 700GB worth of shows

[redman]

I have been running sage constantly now for almost a year.
Apart from the hassles I had setting up my PVR-350, etc its been pretty smooth sailing.
Until this morning.
Last night - put Sage to sleep after watch Las Vegas

This morning bring sage out of sleep and 3 of my 400 shows are there. ALL of them are gone. Deleted from the hard drive. Emptied out of the Wiz.bin

No chance to recover. Even if I use handyrecover to bring back most of the deleted files, my backup wiz.bak and other backups I make, just revert to the same information... 4 shows.

The EPG was also blank with no information. I had to force a epg update, and reboot for it to get that back as well...

I have never had anything like this before. I wonder what sage wants to record that it needs to clear this much space.... sigh.

[Wheemer]

In my opinion there need to be some failsafes added to the core of SageTV in order to make situations like this not possible. No matter how much effort is put into backups and keeping your system running smoothly it seems this sorta thing is just a matter of time for some.

I take it none of these shows were locked in sage using the archive command?

[redman]

Yes. Plenty of them were.
Indiscriminate deletion.
Movies and shows archived, favorite shows with do not delete...everything went.
And the four it chose to keep... good grief.

[dagar]

Agh, that's aweful. I'd cry, ok I just be pissed, if I lost my 121 episodes of "Good Eats"!

[lovingHDTV]

I've always felt that Sage is too willing to delete shows. For a program who's main function is to create recordings it is very willing to removed them. I would think there would be more fail safe mechanisms in the delete process.

[dagar]

Agree. I don't want anything deleted unless --> I <-- want it deleted. Which goes for other people using the system (on one of several clients). Deleting shows and whacking the config needs to be restricted, as does random deletions.

On a similar thread, perhaps removing show data from the wiz.bin into something that is exportable and readable would be a good thing. Keep the hashed voodoo in there, but come on, our recording database should be accessible.

[JUC]

I think we need to look into 'why' your shows got deleted in the first place. I am getting worried now myself after hearing your story. Does 'Archive' do nothing?
JUC

[gplasky]

You should probably look to see if that drive is going bad. There's no way Sage should of deleted 400 TV shows (700GB) and your archived shows. Is everything (OS and Data) on one drive or is it physical, seperate drives?

Gerry

[Opus4]

The only reason I recall for SageTV to go overboard on deletions is when it needs to delete a file to make roomn for a new recording, but there is something like Norton Recycle Bin running. In this case, the file doesn't actually get deleted, SageTV checks free space, notices there isn't enough space, so it deletes another show, the space isn't actually freed, not enough space available yet, delete a show, the space isn't freed, etc.... This has definitely happened to people. (And perhaps SageTV could/should check for its occurrence somehow.)

But, as far as I know, SageTV isn't supposed to ever delete any Manual Recordings, manual-delete Favorites, or Archived shows. If there wasn't some sort of drive problem, I'm not sure why those types of files would get deleted. Hmmm... If wiz.bin got corrupted & replaced...

Oh: here's another idea: What version of SageTV are you running? Some older versions could delete unknown video files that it found in the recording dirs. So, if wiz.bin got corrupted (also an issue with older versions), it could lose info on your recordings and root out all unauthorized infiltrators. v2.2.8 should not do this, though.

- Andy

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by Opus4

unauthorized infiltrators

[redman]

I am running 2.2.2 with no issues for ages.
I have it over 3 HDD's each of which were affected to some degree (i.e. about 50 shows still left on the drives, but not seen by Sage. (i.e. wiz.bin / bak / backup all took a powder.)
Looking at handy recover most of the shows were available to recover from deletion if I wanted to, but still would not be seen by sage. (i.e. that damnable wiz again)
Not running anything else on the box apart from sage. Haven't actually touched it in ages (no monitor or keyboard, etc connected... just jump in through VNC), so there was nothing that happened.... weird. Its recording fine again too.
At least I had watched all the shows I wanted too (Arrested development, CSI and Las Vegas marathon on the weekend.)

Still very confused.... I thought I had this sage thingamijig all worked out now....


If ever oh ever a wiz there was....

[nielm]

Originally Posted by redman

I am running 2.2.2 with no issues for ages.

This is not very helpful now, but you do know that that is a beta version with known bugs?

Looking at handy recover most of the shows were available to recover from deletion if I wanted to, but still would not be seen by sage. (i.e. that damnable wiz again)

You could have restored them, then moved them into a library directory (not a recording directory), so that at least the files were available even if the EPG data is not.

[silkshadow]

Redman, I see you are in Singapore. What are you using for your grabber? I ask because Starhub's website has been acting a bit wierd recently. I know in version 2.1 I had AXN recordings get erased when Starhub messed up AXN big time. So I've been using TVxb to "backup" AXN and it hasn't happened since. I have no idea why this would cause recordings to get deleted but, after troubleshooting, the epg screw up was the only things that could've cause those recordings to get erased.

[DFranch]

I have had shows dissappear for no reason. I have a favorite for Dateline NBC, with manual delete, keep all episodes. Last Friday I had 2 episodes of dateline recorded, on Friday it recorded a third episode, I saw it in Sage recordings. In the morning there were only 2 episodes remaining, it did not even delete the oldest episode, it deleted the second oldest episode. I am running 2.2.8, and I had over 150 GB free. I am not running Norton. I am using Cayars STV (Ver 17). Sage can delete recordings for no apparent reason. I think Sage should at least keep a log of shows that it deletes, that way we can at least get an explanation why a show was deleted. It should be viewable in sage, not require you to go to windows.

[Wheemer]

That sounds only logical... To think that there is so much going on in the background intelligently without a log of what it does is like an oxymoron, sort of. What Sage seems to be doing in these testimonies is better described as maniacal.

[redman]

Yes Silk, I am in Singapore (on htpc-gear as Tusc).
And the EPG has been playing up recently. Like I mentioned, when i looked at the epg it was totally blank, so maybe that had something to do with it. Although my history shows a full file getting downloaded that night, it looks like it crapped out when updating and may have corrupted my wiz.

Does this sound like a probable scenario?
I have now updated to the latest release of sage, just hope it doesn't happen again.

I think its funny to call something Intelligent Recording and then label the file that looks after it the 'WIZ' with all its magical connotations.

[silkshadow]

Sorry I can't be more help but just wanted to say, hey Tusc!

On a similar thread, perhaps removing show data from the wiz.bin into something that is exportable and readable would be a good thing. Keep the hashed voodoo in there, but come on, our recording database should be accessible.

This is a very serious thing that needs to be addressed by Sage. The fact that we cannot get into out databse is just a constant source of difficulties. Just as an example, I've had a ghost manual recording that has shown up as a conflict since I started using Sage. I haven't seen the actual Sage icon since I installed Sage. All I see is the red exlclamation mark 24/7. The inability to go into my wiz.bin and remove that single entry is quite a pain. Thats just an example, with Redman's situation being a worst case senario of not even being able to see why Sage deleted all his recordings.

[Lucas]

Here's my 2 cents....

I have a similar problem and it is related to the EPG(XMLTV plugin).

Every time I perform an update(lets say at 7am) and there was a show that was recorded earlier the same day, say 3am. My grabber replaces the epg entries for the same day morning shows with "no schedule".
I use TVXB and the site it grabs from does not give listings from midnight but from noon onwards. So the grabber inserts "no schedule" which overwrites the info from the previous grab.

As soon as this happens the 3am show vanishes.

I suspect that this is what happened here. Maybe the info the grabber put in the epgdata.xml file confused the plug-in and SageTV updated all previous epg entries with null. SageTV then lost all.....

[wexsmith]

Sage has dumped my programs like that 3 different times. No idea what causes it, but I feel your pain.

It's not the HD in my case either. I swapped it out for another and after a month it dumped the shows.

"It's a feature!"

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by wexsmith

Sage has dumped my programs like that 3 different times. No idea what causes it, but I feel your pain.

Bad Sage.....Bad