Recordings Deleted Mysteriously!

[gphil]

On Monday and Tuesday, I had a bunch of recordings automagically get deleted from my Windows 7 media center machine. Unfortunately, I didn't catch on to it until Wednesday night. By then, my nightly backups had run and flushed out the old backups, so basically, I'm skrewed out of those recordings. What puzzles me, is why anything deleted in the first place. Currently, I have a 1Tb drive that's roughly 1/3 full. Looking at the media center history, a couple of the messages are as follows:

(Recording A) was deleted by Windows Media Center on 3/18/2013 1:49:32 due
to a lack of available disk space. Of the 931.5 GB quota, 396.2 GB are now in use.

(Recording A) was deleted by the system on 3/19/2013 7:11:07 to create disk space
to record (Recording B). Of the 931.5 GB quota, 267.7 GB are now in use.

The recordings it deleted were by now means 100's of GB's big. They were average sized as far as I'm concerned. For the most part, it was older recordings that got deleted (which makes sense, as that's what my series settings are set to), but may have skipped a couple and deleted stuff that wasn't as old.

I checked my storage settings, and they appear to be set to use that max amount of available storage on the drive.
I restarted the machine in hopes that it was just a temporary bug.

I can deal with the lost recordings, but I'm just trying to understand why anything got deleted in the first place when there was more than enough available storage. I know I can go in to my series settings and change to not automagically delete, but will that prevent new recordings if this rogue issue happens again? Did media center make some horrible predictions when it calculated needed storage for upcoming scheduled recordings? Hope someone has an answer, or at least has ran into this same issue.

[Tracer]

Go into your settings menu then under /Recorder/Recorder Storage/ see how much of the 1TB drive has been allocated "Maximum TV limit". If I remember by default Media Center doesn't allocate the maximum amount of drive space, just increase the "Maximum TV limit".

[gphil]

The "Maximum TV limit" is currently set to 931GB. That is one of the first things I had looked at because last fall, I had upgraded from a 500GB hard drive that crashed to the 1TB by restoring a system backup WHS system backup image. I thought maybe a setting was still configured to the size of the old drive. There is more than enough storage available to currently allow 102.5 hours of HD video. I'm almost positive that I've never cracked 50% usage on that drive and I've definitely had a lot more recorded than I do now.

All I can think of is that media center thought something really big was coming and tried to make a lot of room for it. That, or the live TV buffer got stuck and kept filling up the drive, but it eventually cleared out. This seems to be more than just a bad setting on my part. I think the computer just wigged out for some strange reason.

[Scallica]

All I can think of is that media center thought something really big was coming and tried to make a lot of room for it.

Yes, sometimes recorded shows are automatically deleted to clear space for scheduled recordings. All it takes is a series recording to have a marathon listed in the guide and WMC starts clearing space. Do you have a lot of scheduled recordings?

[blueiedgod]

Change the settings not to delete when space is needed. You will see in the guide yellow tirangle with an exclamation point saying that program will not be recorded due to insufficient space. WMC looks at least 2 weeks in advance for recordings.

If you want to keep recordings, or just don't have time to watch them, you need lots and lots of storage, we are up to 17 TB!!!!

[gphil]

Yes, sometimes recorded shows are automatically deleted to clear space for scheduled recordings. All it takes is a series recording to have a marathon listed in the guide and WMC starts clearing space. Do you have a lot of scheduled recordings?

I do have have quite a few series recordings set up.
I have also sometimes seen, in the past, some shows scheduled to record a week or two out that look like a marathon, but when it get closer to that day, the guide updates and is more accurate to indicate a new or rerun show and the extra shows do not record.

Change the settings not to delete when space is needed. You will see in the guide yellow tirangle with an exclamation point saying that program will not be recorded due to insufficient space. WMC looks at least 2 weeks in advance for recordings.

If you want to keep recordings, or just don't have time to watch them, you need lots and lots of storage, we are up to 17 TB!!!!

I might have to consider that. Hehe, I'm impressed with the 17TB. I thought I was bad with my 2TB of saved TV and movies (+2TB more for a backup) on my server. I just bought a 4bay external JBOD tower the will eventually house 2 3TB drives to expand my movie collection (and backup). The other 2 bays will stay empty until I need them. I'm not big on RAID, so I just have software on a task scheduler that syncs up my files nightly from the primary drive location to the backup location on another drive.

PS. My media center has been stable the last couple of days. Nothing else has gotten deleted. Thanks for the advice so far.

[gphil]

Well, I was looking at my history log and it looks like I lost some more recordings last week (even though I have 700 GB free). My next step is to set up a task scheduler that will monitor the event log and then send me an email whenever a recording is deleted automatically by the system. Usually I have 1 or 2 days to recover the files from backups as long as I am aware that they have been deleted.

I also bought a JBOD tower and attached it to my WHS machine. Still need to get some hard drives for it though. Once I do that and can free up some space on my existing server's drives, maybe I can experiment with the Recorded TV Archiving feature between WHS and Media Center. My understanding is that it would keep space freed up on the Media Center machine by moving the recordings to WHS, thus preventing files from being deleted to take care of space concerns.

P.S. As of right now, I haven't changed any settings as suggested in previous comments. I still have the maximum TV limit maxed out as I always have. I still have my series settings set to delete when space is needed.

[foxwood]

As a matter of interest, when you were setting the Guide up, what provider did you tell Windows to use for your programming?

[gphil]

As a matter of interest, when you were setting the Guide up, what provider did you tell Windows to use for your programming?

My cable provider is Midcontinent Communications. I live in West Fargo, ND.

I believe I selected "Midcontinent Communications - Digital (Horace)" after entering zip code of 58078.

[foxwood]

I just wondered if there was an issue with the Guide data that you're using. If you were using a bigger provider, then there would be more likely to be other people in the same boat, but it'd be harder to prove with a smaller regional provider (unless there's someone else from that neck of the woods reading this thread!!)

[gphil]

Yeah, I'm a bit of a minority compared to the Time Warner/Comcast world. I do love Midco though. They are pretty customer oriented.

So, I have PC Monitor installed on my servers at home and I just set it up on the Media Center server to monitor the event log for Informational event codes 13 and 15 for Media Center. As soon as something gets automatically deleted by the machine itself, it will create an event log and PC Monitor will send an alert to my phone and tablet. That way I'll catch it as it's happening and can maybe see if a marathon of shows are scheduled to record or some other issue. At the very least, I can restore backups in time. If I find anything more, I'll be sure to report back here.

[CyberSimian]

On Monday and Tuesday, I had a bunch of recordings automagically get deleted from my Windows 7 media center machine. Unfortunately, I didn't catch on to it until Wednesday night. By then, my nightly backups had run and flushed out the old backups, so basically, I'm skrewed out of those recordings.

I don't back-up recordings of TV, but I do back-up all other files of my creation (documents, email, photographs, programs). However, with the back-up program that I use, when a file is modified or disappears from the source disk, the back-up copy is not deleted from the back-up disk. Instead, the back-up copy is moved from the back-up disk to the archive disk, where all of the obsolescent files reside.

A file on the back-up disk is retained for as long as the corresponding file exists on the source disk, but files in the archive are not retained indefinitely (to limit the storage consumed). I currently have the retention period for the archive set to 5 years.

The back-up program that I use is one that I wrote myself, but I would expect that there are commercially available or freeware programs that offer a similar facility.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[foxwood]

I'm pretty sure that a 5 year archive of WTV files would stretch most users resources! Even a relatively modest 20GB/day (2 or 3 hours of HD) would run to 7TB/year.

[gphil]

This is exactly my situation. I use Beyond Compare to automatically create syncronized duplicates for files such as documents/music/pictures locally and CrashPlan to create offsite backups of those same files (which I believe retains a copy of a deleted file for as long as space is available on the destination drive). On top of that, incremental nightly disk images are created by WHS for each PC on my network. I also use Beyond Compare to syncronize my Recorded TV, but when it runs 24 hours later, the folders resync and anything that got deleted during the day is deleted from the backup that night. Like foxwood said, it's just not feasible to hold onto backups of WTV for long term since it would eat up space really fast. I do like your setup though, CyberSimian. I'll have to look into setting up a similar plan that would archive deleted shows for maybe a week instead of 5 years as is your case. Definitely something I'll have to look into.

[gphil]

I know this is a really old post, but I think I have found a solution to my problem.

To recap, I had reimaged a backup of my system to a new larger hard drive after the old drive failed. After doing that, I started having issues with recordings being deleted. It was acting as if the hard drive was full when it wasn't even close to being full. The history would indicate that a recording was deleted, due to a lack of available disk space, but at the same time, would tell me that there was several hundred GB free. At no time did I ever adjust the maximum recording time in the media center settings. It was set to 100% so I left it as is.

After digging some more, I eventually pulled up the maximum recording space setting in the registry (not sure of the location anymore). After that I went into media center, dropped down the maximum recording space a little bit, then increased it back to 100%. After that I looked at the registry again and the number had increase dramatically.

I'm almost positive that since I had reimaged to a new larger hard drive, the registry settings carried over and media center still thought that I had the smaller hard drive. I've gone several months without any issues as of yet, and I'm pretty sure that I have used more space for recordings, beyond the original imaginary threshold, that I seemed to be running into.

Hope this makes sense and somebody gets some use out of it. I try to avoid a fresh install of my media center machine due to my mix of 5 analogue/digital - internal/network tuners, authorities to network based storage on my WHS, heavy guide customization to prioritize tuners to my liking and to remove unused channels and fix channel numbers.

Pending fund availability, I do plan to replace this machine with a new custom made machine with a cable card tuner. This will greatly simplify my setup, and will allow my to keep the old machine as a backup.

That old machine is a champ though. It's an 8 year old P4 that has since had the power supply replaced, RAM upgraded, various tuner upgrades(until I found a combination that didn't crap out every other day), original hard drives(raid 0) that performed nonstop I/O for about 7 years before they finally failed, and a case that doesn't fully close anymore(Dell). That thing is on 24/7 as well as the xbox that is streaming live TV from it all the time.

[krispy]

Same thing with me:

The Big Bang Theory: The Itchy Brain Simulation was deleted by the system on 1/4/2014 11:01:12 PM to create disk space to record Saturday Night Live: Best of This Season. Of the 931.5 GB quota, 455.1 GB are now in use.

I have also recently swapped drives but I am pretty sure i changed the quota in wmc at that time. Dialed it back to 900 GB, hope that does the trick.

[J38]

Thanks for updating gphil.

I'm about to ugprade the HDD and I will be sure to check that registry setting.

Thanks again.