[mythtv-users] MythTV 0.23 backend suddenly auto-expired a ton of recordings...

[Brett Kosinski]

> MythTV doesn't just delete stuff--it only deletes while recording and only

Unless there's a bug... :)

> on the file system in use and only when there's not enough space on the file
> system in question and only until there's enough space on the file system in
> use.  So, if something is filling the file system as fast as or faster than
> MythTV is deleting stuff, it won't stop expiring stuff (at least not until
> the recording finishes).  Or, if your file system doesn't show additional
> extra space after something is deleted, MythTV won't stop expiring stuff.

Yeah, but if that were the case, I'd expect the disk to be relatively
full, as whatever was writing would, presumably, be filling the disk
as Myth was auto-expiring.  But that wasn't happening.  Furthermore,
this was going on for a full 7 hours... I can think of nothing that
was running on that machine that, over a 7 hour period, would be
writing large volumes of data (I did have a couple torrents running,
but they pre-allocate their disk space in one shot right at the
outset).

Worse, it wasn't just expiring all the old content first.  Rather, it
seemed to pick things from all over the place, some watched, some not,
some months and months old, some very recent.

Heck, even if it was the OS reporting incorrect space free (which is
unlikely, as no errors are indicated in the kernel logs), I would
expect the autoexpire to hit watched, live, and old stuff first (plus
priorities), but it doesn't seem that's what happened.  For example, I
had a bunch of Mentalist episodes from the last season, and it expired
about a half of them, but not all.  Meanwhile, I have old Olympics
recordings lying around (darn wife :), and again, half expired, half
not.  And then it went and killed recordings from August 5th.

> Note, however, if your:
>
> Extra Disk Space
> Extra disk space (in Gigabytes) that you want to keep free on the recording
> file systems beyond what MythTV requires.
>
> setting got changed to, say, 300GB (after having been set at 30GB) and a
> recording started, it would delete from the file system to which it's
> recording until 300GB was free (taking a bit over 250GB).  Note, also, that
> setting is global, so it applies to all of your file systems--300GB would
> keep 300GB free on each of your 2TB file system, your 1TB file system, your
> 500GB file system and your 200GB file system--where that last one would
> always have exactly one recording on it since it's smaller than 300GB.

Yeah, I *really* doubt the setting got jacked by mistake... I went to
look when I noticed the space suddenly freed up on the filesystem, and
it was still set to 30 gigs, just as before.

Brett.