[mythtv-users] shows Expired unexpectedly

[Jerome Yuzyk]

On Wednesday 28 February 2007 11:28, Josh wrote:
> James Pifer wrote:
> > I realized last night that I lost several episodes of 24 and a couple
> > others. Worst part is that I had not watched them yet! When I checked
> > the logs they were Expired because of disk space. I have a 750 gig drive
> > and it did get down to just under a 100 gig free around the same time
> > these expired. I've been looking through the setup screens over and over
> > but I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
> >
> > Where is the setting to tell myth when to start expiring recordings? I'm
> > guessing mine is set at 100 GB.
>
> It expires if an upcoming recording requires more space then it
> currently available on the disk. I use a shell script I wrote that runs
> as a cron every day and if my disk space is lower then X it sends me an
> e-mail telling me which shows are next on the "auto-expire" list.

I got zinged by this last night. I was watching a hockey game live, while 
recording two regular weekly shows. I knew I was low on disk space but not as 
much as I thought. When the game ended I went to my Recordings list and saw 
only one of the 2 shows was listed. - head scratching - Then I looked through 
the backend log and saw what happened: The 2nd show was recorded, and even 
comflagged, but as I watched the game I ran out of space. Since I watched the 
game from the beginning the recording file wasn't a candidate for expiry. 
But, the newly-recorded show was, and Myth happily deleted it since (I guess) 
it was most-recent and (I guess) smallest. When this wan't enough space Myth 
deleted the next file on it's "expirable" list, and that took out a movie 
that was soft-linked (via mytharchive.pl) to another machine, which of course 
didn't do anything for the free space remaining in my Recordings location. 
Fortunately the game ended early enough that I could delete its recording 
file before Myth blew away all my soft-linked recordings, on its way to 
expiring the recordings that would _really_ free up space. I learned about 
this behaviour the last time I ran out of space.

One thing that would make this more of a non-issue for me, would be for 
expired recordings to get the "Delete and Rerecord" treatment rather than 
just be deleted. The movies I record come around again so I can wait to get 
them later. Now I have to remember what got wiped and remember to queue it 
again if I see it in the listings.