Help! Missing Recordings

[Fusion]

I have two hard drives on my computer that are used for recordings: C and E. Drive E is 200GB holds 80% of my recordings. I was recently making some hardware modifications and when I was finished, all the recordings located on the E drive were gone. The files are still there and the drive/path is still the same, they are just missing from the recordings menu.

I tried various options specified in this thread, including using advanced_video_file_recovery and repair_mismatched_media_filenames to no avail.

I have a theory about what might have happened. When I was tinkering at one point I believe the E drive was detached and I had a USB drive attached. On my computer I have Sage set to start automatically when the computer starts. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but what I think happened is that the USB drive was assigned to drive letter E and when Sage started and didn't find the usual recording files on drive E, it deleted them from the database.

I have a backup of wiz.bin from January and this includes most of my recordings, but it is obviously missing anything recorded in the last month and a half.

Is there anything that I can do at this point to recover all of my recordings?

[BobPhoenix]

You could temporarily use the old wiz.bin that would link to the files. Use the Web server to export the info. Then switch to the current wiz.bin and re-import the info back into the database. my 2¢ worth.

[Opus4]

The advanced_video_file_recovery property cannot be used if the files are not currently in the database, and repair_mismatched_media_filenames can only rename files that are also currently in the database before you move the files.

What version of SageTV are you using? Those properties only exist for recent versions.

Once recorded files have been unlinked from their airing info, SageTV can only match them via their ID numbers. And, if you are using a much older version, their airing info can get removed too, so there is nothing to relink them to after that.

If you are using v6.2 or later... make backups of your database.

If they have been imported, exit SageTV, then move the files to a folder where SageTV cannot see them. Restart SageTV to clear them as imports. Exit SageTV, move them back to a recording dir & restart SageTV to see if any of them are recognized as recordings now.

Any files not recorded may have ID numbers as part of the their filenames that no longer match the airing IDs that they should be linked to. In this case, look up the old airings in nielm's webserver to get the Airing ID, then change the ID number that is part of the filename to the one you see in the webserver.

- Andy

[Fusion]

I used the webserver method to lookup the airing IDs and then renamed the recording files. They were older recordings and it appears the airing IDs changed. Once I renamed the files, Sage recognized them and they showed up in the recording menu again.

[RobJ]

Originally Posted by Fusion

I used the webserver method to lookup the airing IDs and then renamed the recording files. They were older recordings and it appears the airing IDs changed. Once I renamed the files, Sage recognized them and they showed up in the recording menu again.

That is what the repair_mismatched_media_filenames parameter is for, I believe, if done BEFORE moving recordings. Since this issue affected you with one set of recordings, you probably have others that are also affected, so I would recommend you follow Andy's procedure in the thread you linked. It saved me some additional grief, with a similar situation.