my recording was deleted!

[buzzerbee]

I made an image of my C drive Sunday afternoon. That night, I recorded a show onto my F drive.
Last night, I restored my C image, incl the sage folder. It must have deleted the file on my F drive. I can't find it anywhere. Any ideas??

[Opus4]

What version of SageTV are you running? v2.1 shouldn't be deleting recordings it finds in video dirs. Is the file still on the drive?

BTW: when restoring the old SageTV dir, did you also restore the old wiz.bin file? If so, that newer manual recording would not be unrecognized. It should then be treated as an imported video & placed in the Video Library.

- Andy

[buzzerbee]

its version2 and I searched all teh drives. it's not there. I didn't restore anything to the sage directory. I looked in the folder itself, not via the sage 'recordings' listing

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by buzzerbee

its version2

I think v2 used to delete unrecognized videos in the video dirs unless use_errant_dir was set to true. That changed in some version, but I don't know which one & it shouldn't be deleting them in v2.1. If it does, let tech support know.

I didn't restore anything to the sage directory.

I thought you said that you restored the entire C drive, including the SageTV dir, after the recording was made? That would have restored an old copy of wiz.bin. Maybe I misunderstood that part.

- Andy

[buzzerbee]

you are correct about the sage dir. I restored that to the one in the image made before the recording. I don't know how to tell which version of 2 I'm runnign.
but regardless of which wiz.bin is there, it shouldn't delete my recording right?

just noticed:

the odd thing is that there are at least six other files in the folder that sage made over many months?
where could my movie I recorded sun ngiht go??
sorry- I guess this isn't a bug.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by buzzerbee

I don't know how to tell which version of 2 I'm runnign.

If you go to Setup -> System Information, the first line gives the version number.

but regardless of which wiz.bin is there, it shouldn't delete my recording right?

v2.1 _shouldn't_, as far as I know.

Edit: Those other recordings are older & were already there when the older wiz.bin was in use.

- Andy

[buzzerbee]

v2.0.20 and I searched all my hard drives for *.mpg and the latest is Sat. I wonder what happened. Thanks andy for tryign to help

[Opus4]

I reviewed my notes from when I was working on the manual... unrecognized recordings are not supposed to be auto-deleted any more, even in 2.0. But, there may have been bugs. (I always used seeker/use_errant_dir=true in 2.0.)

If v2.1 deletes a recording that it doesn't recognize, then that should be reported to tech support. (As mentioned above, they are supposed to be imported instead.)

- Andy

[buzzerbee]

I'll change it to this anyway
seeker/use_errant_dir=true

thanks

[Opus4]

Here is another possibility that was pointed out to me: The Manual Recording you lost was in the EPG in the old wiz.bin, so when the file was seen during startup, perhaps it was marked as a recording for the show it saw in the EPG. Since the recording was made after that wiz.bin was used, SageTV did not know that it was a Manual Recording, so it treated as a regular recording & would thus be similar to live TV: one of the first to be deleted when space is needed. Also, in v2.0, if you have Intelligent Recording off, then such recordings are deleted immediately by default, since it will only keep Manual Recordings and Favorites. (See the bottom of p. 167 of the v2.0 manual for a property to prevent this: seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off; note that this is not an issue in v2.1.) I hope that paragraph made sense. (And I recommend you set this v2.0 property if you aren't going to use 2.1 right away.)

[1-22-05 Update: I mention in my next post that v2.1 still has deletion problems when it starts & the property mentioned here should be set to false in order to prevent those 'unwanted' file from being deleted in certain circumstances when SageTV starts.]

If the file had a name that did not match a listing in the EPG, none of this would happen: it should just get imported. The strangeness may have resulted from restoring the old wiz.bin & having a recording with a filename that matched a show in the EPG.

I don't remember every post I read here... Is anyone using v2.1 having recordings getting deleted unexpectedly? (i.e. that can't be explained by the normal reasons of file deletion such as space being needed for a new recording & so on.)

- Andy

[Drinyth]

Is anyone using v2.1 having recordings getting deleted unexpectedly? (i.e. that can't be explained by the normal reasons of file deletion such as space being needed for a new recording & so on.)

*raises his hand*

This morning, I saw that one of my ER recordings was just missing. I currently have ER setup as my highest priority favorite (new runs only) and auto-delete for that favorite is set to no. But sure enough, it just disappeared.

Today, I had two manual recordings of shows that did get recorded and that I saw in my video library afterwards. I went out this afternoon and when I got back, the shows were gone.

I'm starting to get a little nervous now. That's three shows that just up and deleted themselves. I verified that the .mpg files are gone. I'm running Cayars17.stv and in his Maintenance -> Delete Orphan Files menu, the .ccno, .log, .txt, and .VPrj files are there for all three shows but the .mpg file is missing.

Only thing that I've done recently was upgrade to the 2.2.4 beta and then downgrade back down to 2.1 after having a problem with VMR9 (which I reported). For both the upgrade and the downgrade, I just executed the .exe file without removing it first. It was said that was acceptable for the upgrade, but it seemed to work for the downgrade too.

I have plenty of disk space left. Sage is setup to "use all" and I'm only using 150 GB of my 300 GB disk.

Any ideas?

[Opus4]

This thread is from quite a while back. There were some deletion errors found in v2.1 that should be fixed for v2.2. I don't know how you handled switching your wiz.bin files when you went back to 2.1 from 2.2, but many times the older version is not compatible with wiz.bin from a newer version - which is why you should save the older wiz.bin before installing a beta: that way you can restore the old wiz.bin if you revert back to the old version. Shows recorded with the newer version may be vermin to v2.1, and could be evicted immediately when that version starts, unless you set seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=false. (I don't know if anything I said fits your situation, but I figured I woudl toss out a few comments.)

- Andy

[Drinyth]

Andy is the man with the answers once again!

Definitely makes sense. I did save a copy of wiz.bin before I upgraded to 2.2.4, but didn't revert to this version when I downgraded. I should still have the older file lying around.

What exactly does the wiz.bin contain? Can I still revert back to this file since I've been running 2.1 for a while and there are new recordings and what not that I've done since that older wiz.bin was created?

Thanks!!

[Drinyth]

I went and reverted to the old version. Everything seems like it's running ok. From briefly reading the forums, it looks like wiz.bin keeps all the program information and what not of your saved recording stored in it? So at worst, I'll have some shows that have no program information? If that's the case, no big deal.

On a side note, that was I'm sure related to my problem. I was noticing that before I reverted, some shows that were recorded as favorites weren't listed as favorites (looking at the favorites icon in Cayars). After reverting the wiz.bin file, these shows corrected themselves.

So hopefully I won't have any more random deletes moving forward. And now I know how to downgrade back to a lesser version correctly!

Thanks Andy!

[Drinyth]

And replying to myself yet again, it looks like everything that I recorded while I was running the "bad" version of wiz.bin is no longer in my video folder either. I manually checked the folder, and sure enough all the .mpg's that got recorded during that time have been deleted. Oh well... better than having random deletes moving forward, I guess.

[Opus4]

Yes, wiz.bin contains all the info for your recordings, EPG, favs, etc. Program configuration settings are in the properties file(s).

About those latest lost recordings: sorry, but I tried to warn you in post #12 by suggesting changing that property so that unwanted/unrecognized files wouldn't be deleted when v2.1 starts, as you noticed happened. One of the things fixed for the 2.2 beta was that exact problem where SageTV would start, see recordings that were listed in the EPG that it doesn't know were scheduled (perhaps because an older wiz.bin file was restored) and then deletes them because it thinks they are live TV shows which should be junked as soon as possible. The same thing happens in v2.1 when files are moved to a new video directory if they are not favs: in the process of changing its internal data for the recording, SageTV loses certain info that says the files are not live TV & promptly deletes the recordings.

Edit: I updated an older post from Nov 2004, #10, so that the property recommendation matches what I wrote in my previous post, #12, above.

- Andy

[Drinyth]

You gave me more than fair warning. It was totally my fault for skimming too much and not reading closely enough. I'm guessing that I read the first half of your message, saw that the issue was related to wiz.bin and ran off working on that theory without reading the second half.

Thanks for the explanation!

[orionhunter34]

I have been experiencing some odd behavior from sageTV 2.1 also. I am also using Cayars latest STV. I do not know if it is sageTV or Cayars that is the problem. The first problem was that when I started using favorites the programs were deleted before I could even watch them and I still had plenty of hard drive space left (>100GB). So now I do not let SageTv manage my favorites deletion because I do not trust it.

The next problem is that two manually recordings were recently deleted. For the first one I had one of Cayars options on that would ask if you wan't to delete the program after you were done. I chose cancel because I did not want to delete the show but the show was deleted anyway and I was unable to recover it with file recovery software. After that I deselected the Cayars option to ask the user to delete files after watching.

The next show that was deleted was done so after I watched the program but not right after. After the show was over and it exited back to the menu I selected the show because I wanted to archive it. However, when it went into the show's menu details there was no archive button option like usual. So, I pressed the back button to go to the previous menu and the show was deleted. I looked for it with file recovery software but it could only detect the show as being deleted and 0 bytes long. So this one too was gone. Any ideas?

[nathanwray]

Hi, I posted this as a new discussion before I located this one. I see mentions of versions newer than 2.1, are these beta?

Is "my entire library gets deleted weekly" a common problem?

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ighlight=space