Advice for recording strategy while on vacation

[Gabriel]

I am going on vacation and will be leaving SageTV running. If I leave all my current favorites on, I am pretty sure I will run out of HD space, so I would need to record only the most important shows for me. I would like to hear from other users how they deal with this. For example, what is the best way to disable favorites and re-enabling them when I get back?
Thanks, Gabriel

[Conejo]

You could modify the "Keep up to" on your least favorites to '1' to prevent them from overrunning memory but allowing you to keep them in the settings.

A better option would be to buy a 500GB external USB Drive and add it into your recording locations.

[Opus4]

You could limit each Favorite to a channel the show doesn't record on. Set them all to CSPAN or your cable guide channel & you'll be able to easily tell which need to be reset.

I use Placeshifter or nielm's webserver (in the customizations forum) to manage my recordings while I'm away from home.

- Andy

[Fuzzy]

Or, instead, you could go through your recording schedule for the time you will be gone, and set each of them you KNOW you want to keep to a Manual Recording. This will prevent them from being auto-deleted.

[Brent]

My strategy has been to buy more hard drive space if I'm running up to filling up the drive. It's the more expensive solution, but it works

You could also reduce the quality for those shows expected to record while you're gone.

[tmiranda]

Bring Placeshifter with you, watch what you want to watch, delete what you do not want, set stuff you want to keep as Manual Recording..

Unless you are going someplace really remote you can almost certainly find a computer connected to the web. Bring Placeshifter with you o na memory stick. Nirvana.

[sic0048]

Great comments so far! All right on target and good choices. About the only thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is....

You could see about deleting some older shows before you leave to generate more HD space. If you haven't watched them yet, are you really going to? Putting it another way, which is more important, the current episodes of your favorites, or the already recorded shows on the HD. Let your answer to that question dictate what you do.

Personally I would try to buy more HD space before leaving or delete a bunch of stuff off the HD before I left.

[doc]

You could always turn the whole thing off just in case it catches fire and burns your house down - do you have insurance?

For my last holiday I switched it all off.

The one before I used the web interface to check up on it every couple of days.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by doc

For my last holiday I switched it all off.

That's absolutely blasphemous!!!!

[doc]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

That's absolutely blasphemous!!!!

I was away for 4 weeks and thinking of the electricity bill !!!!

I'd have needed another holiday to catch up on the recordings - thats sounds like a good idea now that I think about it... hmmm

[QueOnda]

I use logmein to make sure sageTV is running from time to time. Also to make new recordings if something was coming i just found out about on the vacation. This also helped me delete some stuff because I was running low on hard drive space.

[toricred]

You could also set up Autocompress if you're not using it already. That would make some recordings take less space. On the other hand you could manually compress the older recordings.

[blade]

All of my favorites are set so that Sage doesn't auto delete anything. If I'm going to be gone for awhile I find a couple of favorites that I'm way behind on watching and that re-air often. I'll set those so that Sage can delete them if necessary. At one point I had +30 episodes of CSI Miami and +50 of CSI NY. Both shows re-air on multiple channels quite often so for me it wasn't a big deal if Sage deleted some.

On occasion I'll compress some shows before I leave. Especially if I have a HD show that has a lot of padding. I pad some shows that typically follow sporting events by as much as an hour. I'll compress these and trim off the unnecessary padding.

My favorite solution is to just buy another hard drive, but that gets costly sometimes.

[Djc208]

An obvious one is to make sure you turn of intelligent recording if you use it. Unless you're using placeshifter or the web server to watch it, letting IR go for a couple of days unsupervised will usually result in you having lots of recordings that have seemingly no relation to your favorites.

On the other hand one advantage of IR is that those recordings are first to go when space gets short, and they're usually expendable so it's a nice buffer.