My 1st real Sage problem: It nuked my favorites!

[rrussell]

Hi, all -

Been using Sage for.. oh, heck, since 1.3.8, and this is the first time anything untoward has happened, but it's a biggie.

My wife and I went away for a week's vacation. We wanted to record the olympics highlights, and I knew that this would take up a bunch of space. So I set it to low-ish quality and flagged several of my favorites as Non-autodelete.

Now, the first thing I noticed when we got back is that there'd been a power failure. The PC was off. D'OH!

I started it back up only when we had some spare time and wanted to catch an old "Dharma & Greg" rerun. (Favorite: Keep 15, autodelete ON, oops.) There were none. I was annoyed, but when I noticed that I hadn't turned off Autodelete, I slapped myself in the forehead and moved on.

A second Favorite was also totally missing,

Then I noticed a third show was only mostly gone. There were two eps left out of an entire season. This one was set to "Keep All" and Autodelete was OFF. This REALLY bothered me.

But the final straw was when I saw several other shows that were flagged as watched, and they had NOT been deleted.

So, the bottom line: Why did it delete my perfectly good unwatched Keep-All favorites, and keep an already-watched one?

I did a search thru the forums for info on this, but the info is scattered far and wide and hurt my little head.

Where can I find a handy, easy-to-read list of rules about what gets deleted and when and under what circumstances? I realize that turning "Auto-delete" to OFF will keep things around, but does that render useless the "Keep at most" number? Why did it prefer unwatched faves over watched ones?

Help!

Thanks,
Rob

[Opus4]

Originally posted by rrussell
Where can I find a handy, easy-to-read list of rules about what gets deleted and when and under what circumstances? I realize that turning "Auto-delete" to OFF will keep things around, but does that render useless the "Keep at most" number? Why did it prefer unwatched faves over watched ones?

You can find an answer to the order of what gets deleted in the FAQs.

Turning autodelete off causes SageTV to ignore the keep at most number. (We've requested that it change, so we'll see if it ever gets changed to stopping recording when the max number is reached.)

SageTV is free to delete non-manual recordings to make room for new recordings. The only thing I can think of is that those watched shows were marked as manual recordings... and manual recordings are never allowed to be automatically deleted. If that is not the case, then I'm not sure about why this occurred.

- Andy

[rrussell]

Thanks, Andy! Here we go.

So, that leaves the question of recording priority... From highest to lowest priority:

• Manual Recordings
• Favorites
• Intelligent Recordings
• Watched Shows
• Live TV
• Don't Like

Meaning: Shows marked as Don't Like are deleted first; then Live TV; then shows marked as watched (should equal LiveTV, since if you watch it 'live' it is marked as watched); then Intelligent Recordings (oldest first? least desirable first? Not sure); then Favorites set to auto-delete (oldest, then lowest priority in Favs list if same age?).

Manual Recordings and Favorites set to "Manual Delete" can never be automatically deleted.

This answer has been updated, since I found further details and am a little more sure of the deletion order. A couple items are not perfectly clear on deletion order (i.e.: which IR gets deleted first?), but the overall list is in the correct order.

So this means that it's really all those HBO movies I decided to manually record that pushed the favorites to the forefront, BUT...

If I had set the new Favorite (in this case, the olympics) a lower priority than the older ones (other vanished shows) then it might not have deleted them? It might have just cycled through the earliest-recorded Olympics instead?

I don't recall the order that the Faves are in. Hm. Hafta doublecheck that.

I still do not know why it deleted my "Keep all No-autodelete" Kingdom Hospital shows, though.

Bother!

I agree - I find the idea that "Autodelete No" disables "Keep At Most" to be inconvenient. The sort of inconvenient that "Deleting the Favorite deletes all the recordings too" falls under. I would like "Keep at Most" to be just that, whether it deletes the oldest to make room for the new, or just stops recording.

Dunno. It's not very clear, either way.

R

[ToxMox]

As far as I can tell priorities in the favorites only affect recording not deletion priority. When Sage starts deleting favorites to make space I think it will delete the oldest first.

[Opus4]

Originally posted by rrussell
I still do not know why it deleted my "Keep all No-autodelete" Kingdom Hospital shows, though.

It is possible that my FAQ was slightly wrong & that favs set with autodelete OFF are not the same thing as "manaul delete". It might just mean that they won't automatically be deleted to make room for more of _those_ favs. I think I noted in that FAQ that some of it was a bit of conjecture, as can be seen with those question marks. I don't have access to the actual code.

- Andy

[rrussell]

Huh.

This would be an ideal spot for Dan and/or Jeff to pop in with some info...

...

(huh)

Aside: Have been hit twice in the past week with power failures. These make my sage box EXCEEDINGLY unhappy, so I'm (finally) investing in a smallish UPS. Odd how it takes a real smack in the head to force one to take relatively simple precautionary steps...