[mythtv-users] lost recordings and database orphans

[Greg Woods]

I've got a problem that the old myth.find_orphans.pl script was supposed
to solve, but it no longer works:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/425156#425156

What happened is that I lost a hard drive that had about 3/4 of my
recordings on it. I don't mind losing the recordings as much as the fact
that I now have a ton of entries in the database for recording files
that no longer exist. Aside from totally cluttering up the Watch
Recordings display, which is a major annoyance, even worse is that these
episodes will not re-record, because the database has recorded that I
already have them. There are over 600 lost recordings, so going through
the GUI and manually removing the ones that are missing would take days.
There has to be a better way.

I would like to take a stab at cleaning up the database, but determining
all the interrelationships between the tables is probably a bit beyond
my SQL skills. Is there anyone who knows the database enough to at least
tell me which tables need to be modified? For example, I can find the
"basename" values in the "recorded" table and determine which entries in
this table correspond to missing files. I could probably even script
something that would check them and delete all the entries in this table
that correspond to missing files. But I will bet there are references in
other tables that point to the entries in this table and I will probably
hose things up royally if I just do that.

Any ideas as to what I could do to clean up?

I might even consider just removing all the remaining recordings too if
I knew which tables should be emptied out after that to get me to a
consistent state.

Thank you,
--Greg