[mythtv-users] How to clean out recordings directory?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sat Jun 14 00:37:18 UTC 2008


On 06/13/2008 07:11 PM, The GUIGuy wrote:
> Brad DerManouelian wrote:
>   
>> You want to make sure your recordings are set to auto-expire. This is  
>> set by default so you must have turned it off at some point.
>>
>>     
>
> Maybe, but I don't think so.

I think it's what Brad mentioned (that you didn't really respond to): 
permissions.  It sounds like you've enabled:

Auto Expire Instead of Delete Recording
Instead of deleting a recording, move recording to the 'Deleted' 
recgroup and turn on autoexpire.

so when you deleted the recordings (I'm assuming you deleted them 
through mythfrontend or MythWeb and you didn't do anything crazy like 
"rm /var/lib/mythtv/recordings/*") they were put in the Deleted 
recording group, but left on disk.  Now, they should be expired 
automatically when space is required, but the user running mythbackend 
probably does not have permission to remove the recordings (as Brad 
mentioned).  This would show up in the mythbackend log files with a 
/ton/ of messages about how it's unable to expire recordings.

Or, if the permissions (on both the recordings files and the 
/var/lib/mythtv/recordings directory) are appropriate, you may have:

Delete files slowly
Some filesystems use a lot of resources when eleting large recording 
files.  This option makes Myth delete the file slowly on this backend to 
lessen the impact.

enabled (in mythtv-setup) and just haven't waited long enough (it will 
probably delete at about 2GB/min).  Note that "waiting" long enough 
means leaving mythbackend running long enough to delete a bunch of files.

It is possible that you've "disabled" auto-expire, but since 0.20 and 
above /always/ enable auto-expiration, doing so would require you to 
mark each recording in the Deleted recording group individually to 
disallow auto-expiration.  You would have had to do this since they got 
put into the Deleted recording group since deleting the recording to the 
Deleted group automatically enables auto-expire on the recording.

Mike


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