[mythtv-users] Disk filled up unexpectedly - Auto-expire not working?

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Mon Sep 16 01:51:22 UTC 2019


On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:39:11 -0400, you wrote:

>Recently my MythTV box stopped being able to watch live TV (as it was
>watching live TV), and after a bit of poking around I tracked it down to
>one of my partitions filling up.  I was under the impression that MythTV
>would have done a little bit better at preventing this from happening.
>
>My system has two storage groups:   One small one on a local SSD, and
>another much-larger one on a NAS.  Looking at the auto-expire settings
><https://i.imgur.com/hVzhkOb.png>, I don't see anything out of the ordinary.
>
>I see recordings on the SSD that go back to 2016 that are still on the
>SSD.   And looking at MythWeb I see that they're set to Auto-expire
>(based on the clock icon and associated tooltip).
>
>My impression was that MythTV, as it was watching live TV and the
>SSD-based storage group dropped below 10GB free space, should have
>expired some of those old recordings to ensure that the storage group
>wouldn't fill up.  But it did not do this.
>
>Are my expectations of how auto-expire work not mapping up with reality?
> Or is there perhaps something interfering with auto-expire on my system?
>
>
>Thanks!
>-WD

Unless something has changed recently, your understanding of expiry is
the same as mine.  When mythbackend needs to record and there is not
enough space, it should expire recordings until there is enough space.
Of course, this does not work if there is something else filling up
that space again, such as a runaway log file, but that should not be a
problem for storage groups on drives other than they system drive. The
other thing that is necessary for expiring is that the recordings are
marked as being able to be expired.  So if you go into Information
Centre > System Status > AutoExpire List, do you see recordings listed
there that are on the partition that is full?

One thing that may have changed since you last looked at expiry is
that LiveTV now records to its own storage group, if it exists.  If
the LiveTV storage group does not exist, LiveTV recordings will go to
the Default storage group.  So if you do have a LiveTV storage group,
does it only point to the drive that is full?  Or maybe it points to
/var/lib/mythtv/livetv and that is on the system partition, and the
system partition is full - in which case there may be no recordings on
that partition that are able to be expired, as the regular recording
files are on other partitions.


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