[mythtv] Lost my recording metadata. Thoughts on avoiding in the future...

[Kevin Kuphal]

I had a strange problem last night that dropped nearly all my metadata 
from my box.  I recently was testing some ACPI stuff and had occasion to 
have the box poweroff ungracefully once or twice which resulted in my 
recording mirrored mountpoint to not mount even after I thought I had 
corrected the issue.  It seemed then that the auto-expiration code ran, 
saw my rather small / partition as the recording partition and saw that 
it was below the threshold and started trying to delete stuff.  Needless 
to say, it couldn't, because the files were missing but it still dumped 
the recorded and oldrecorded data for those recordings.

Obviously I could/should have 1) had a SQL backup.  2) Turned off 
auto-expire since I have almost 80 GB free normally.  3) Turned off 
rerecord on autoexpire to retain my metadata in the oldrecorded table 
even if things were deleted.

But, what I'm thinking is, should the system really be dumping metadata 
if it tries to auto-expire a file that doesn't exist? 

Under normal circumstances, you shouldn't end up with orphaned database 
entries like that and the system currently just dumps the meta-data and 
spawns the delete thread without regard for it's success or failure.  I 
would think a better option would be to put all the deletion code in the 
thread that is spawned and only remove metadata if the file was actually 
physically deleted to avoid dumping data when other issues may have 
prevented the file from being unavailable whether locally or via network 
mountpoints.

Thoughts?

Kevin