[mythtv-users] remaining disk space / delete slowly

[Joseph Fry]

>
> Just for clarification, the reason for having delete slowly selected is so
> recordings are recorded over with a new recording (once) instead of with
> zeros now and a new recording later (twice). if this is correct I would
> expect Myth to count deleted recordings (of which I have 55) as available
> space, as reported on the "watch recordings" screen, which it is not, in my
> case, and although I know I have more available space than reported -
> seeing 89% full is hard not to react to.
> Is there any solution, other than a chill pill for this behaviour?
>

As others have stated, the "deleted" recording group is like a recycle bin.


When Mythtv needs space for a recording, it will use any free space first,
then it will first delete recordings from the "deleted" recording group,
then it will delete "watched" recordings, before finally starting to
encroach on your unwatched recordings.  Priority and expiration rules come
in to play at all stages of this process.

While it may give you peace of mind to see a bunch of free space on your
recording drives when you look at them via the OS... don't be fooled.  You
are actually  safer to let mythtv fill your recording drives and manage the
deletions on its own.  That said, this assumes that you follow best
practices which is that your recording drives/partitions be dedicated to
recordings and nothing else.

Here's why it's safer.  If you permanently delete all of your recordings
after you watch them (manually, or automatically after X hours/days) you
end up with a bunch of free space on your drive.  What happens if you
inadvertently (or intentionally) fill that free space with other content...
well mythtv will still want space to record in, so it will just delete your
unwatched recordings.  if you let mythtv manage the deletions, your drive
would always be (almost) full, preventing other users/applications from
writing to the drive.  This typically isn't a problem, but it can be; here
is the worst I ever read about;

User mounted /var to it's own drive, and had the recordings in
/var/mythtv/recordings... seems like a reasonable configuration.  However
while on vacation for 2 weeks, something got jacked and his server was
writing a constant stream of data to /var/log/some.log... IIRC it was 10's
of GB/hr.  It wasn't long before his drive had no free space, so every time
mythtv wanted to record something, it deleted one of his recordings, but
before it got a few minutes in, the drive would be full again so it deleted
another... and so on.  Needless to say, he came home to find only a handful
of recordings left (those he had preserved).

Lets just say, I stopped deleting my recordings from the drive and just let
mythtv do it since reading that.  Having the drive full prevents anyone
(especially me) from being tempted to dump data there temporarily.
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