[vdr] Re: vdr killed my video archive

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.com>]

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Janetzki wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the subject says it all. vdr deleted nearly my complete video archive
> collected througout the last two years.
>
> The situation: I'm using vdr 1.2.2 (with some plugins and the elchi
> patch), started with "-V /video0".
>    /video0      120 GB       Directories/partitions for
>    /video1      100 GB       current revordings
>
>    /video0/zzz_Mehr_Videos       ->  /videos1 (The archive. Note the
>    /video0/zzz_Noch_mehr_Videos  ->  /videos2  extra "s", 160 + 120 GB)
>
> video1 is nearly full, and now, over the weekend, video0 also became
> rather full while a recording was active. Obviously, vdr tried to get
> some space by deleting old recordings. But instead of deleting on the
> _configured_ directories /video0 and /video1 (which would have been no
> problem at all) vdr killed the recordings in the archive. An extremely
> ugly and unnecessary action because there have been about 20 GB of free
> space on each of the partitions /videos1 and /videos2. Needless to say
> that deleting one recording did not raise the amount of free space for
> the current recording, so vdr deleted the next one, and so forth. Only
> the newest recordings survived. An also needless to say that the
> active recording was set up to go to /video0 directly.
>
> I don't know, if this is a bug (YES, in my view) or if this is
> "working as designed". But, if there is a support for multiple
> recording directories (we had that on the list just some days ago),
> there should not be such a really bad misbehaviour. When the program
> sees that it runs out of space for the current recording, it does not
> make sense to delete on completely different partitions.
>
> So everybody, you have been warned. With angry greetings, Ingo
actually, everybody should have been warned when I wrote 10 days ago:

> The only concern I have with the current vdr is: when one of
> these disks becomes full, will vdr run amok and delete old
> recordings randomly from just any disk or will it follow my
> symbolic links and only delete recordings from the disk that
> actually became full?

and Klaus answered:

> I'm not sure. That's probably something that needs to be
> investigated, anyway, since that situation can already
> occur, even without dropping the current "multiple video dir"
> support.

You have been the involuntary tester of this question.
I am sorry. Of course, that's no consolation for you.


I guess the problem is worth fixing.
I suppose vdr needs a C++ method that determines on which disk
a given directory is physically stored. When recording, vdr should
watch the disk that holds the recording's directory. When that disk
becomes full, vdr should find recordings whose directory is physically
on the same disk and only consider these for deletion.

Maybe a setup option "never delete anything" would also be useful?

In the meantime, I'll go through my recordings and assign a
lifetime of 99 to those I never want to lose.

Carsten.



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