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Has anyone experienced or heard of the auto delete function not working? This has happened to me twice now in the past month or two on my HDR-1000S (when, I believe, the hard drive has filled up completely).
For example, this evening, the box failed to record the F1 qualifying highlights on Channel 4 HD, set via series record. There was no ‘failed recording’ listed in Recordings and the race highlights programme is still there in Planned recordings for tomorrow, i.e. the series record is still in effect. I also saw that it said 100% space used. The programme before the F1 was also set to record and it only recorded something like 46 out of 60 minutes. The same three programmes were listed in Deleting soon that had been there for the past two or three weeks, i.e. they had not been deleted automatically. (And yes, Auto Delete is set to On.)
So it seems clear that the auto delete isn’t working, the hard drive filled up during a recording, stopped that recording and failed to record the next one. The same thing happened within the last month or two. At the time I deleted quite a lot of stuff and thought I would just wait and see if it happened again.
I know I can delete stuff manually but with such a big hard drive it can take a lot of button clicking to make much of a difference. The auto delete would be so much better, deleting the oldest recordings… if it actually worked.
Has this happened to anyone else, and is there any solution?
Edit: A failed recording for the F1 qualifying has now appeared in Most recent recordings.
Sorry can’t help as I’ve never used it.
But personally I think the auto delete “KEEP” function is stupid, I watch a programme or series and then make the decision on whether I want to keep or delete. It takes a couple of seconds to delete. It can’t be good having the HDD near maximum capacity all the time, I accidentally filled up my 2Tb with countless hours of HD Olympics and it wasn’t at all happy, wouldn’t play a single recording and the buffer stopped working. Normal service resumed after I deleted about 30% and left it for a few hours.
I usually go through it and have a cull before Christmas to make a bit more room.
Thanks for your reply Reffub. It certainly sounds like you had problems due to a full HD. Could you clarify though, did you have Auto Delete set to On or Off?
It sounds like you’re happy with the way you use yours, but for me, I want Auto Delete to work. It’s there as a feature, it tells us what it’s supposed to do – it should do it. My wife and I often watch stuff at different times. I might watch something and leave it on the box if I think my wife might enjoy it too. It’s also simply quicker to not delete something than delete it.
I agree the periodic cull is an alternative, albeit a PITA in my opinion. The whole point of Auto Delete is that we shouldn’t have to even think about deleting as we go or periodically. It should just work in the background, deleting when it needs to, without you necessarily even noticing.As a Linux server engineer of many years I can tell you there’s no technical reason why a drive can’t be run near maximum capacity. A reliable script that checks how full the drive is and then deletes the oldest items that aren’t marked ‘Keep’ can be written in minutes.
I wonder whether the Auto Delete function is in fact working for anyone – maybe it’s simply broken.
Does anyone have the opposite experience – that Auto Delete is working fine for them?
Auto delete was off on my box it just carried on recording until it run out of space and then refused to do anything else until I deleted loads.
I agree that it should work and I see how you would find it useful.
I did take a instant dislike to it when I first got my box as I ‘Locked’ a recording only to find out I or anyone else could still delete it. A helpful person on a forum told me what the padlock ‘keep’ icon was really for. (My previous Humax box allowed me to lock and pin protect recordings)
I’ve no idea if this auto delete feature works for others.
I agree they could make it clearer what ‘Keep’ does (or is supposed to do*) i.e. it marks recordings that the Auto Delete should not delete.
(* Of course, this will only make any difference if Auto Delete actually works at all!)
Can anyone else say whether Auto Delete definitely works or definitely doesn’t work for them?
Surely somebody else has had their hard drive fill up and noticed whether Auto Delete worked or didn’t work?
Today, my drive was saying 99% full and yet in ‘Deleting soon’ it said I had plenty of space for recordings (and nothing to be deleted automatically soon) – strange, and not true as it had only ~11GB space left (it’s a 2TB drive). It was in power save standby all night from about 1am/2am. I have since deleted several hours of recordings manually, as we have recordings set for this evening which we don’t want to fail.
Found these on another forum, but unfortunately it only confirms other people have had the problem and doesn’t give any clues as to the cause or proper solution, as these people just deleted manually or formatted their drive so there was then plenty of space for recordings again.
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1960727
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=70018595
http://www.joinfreesat.co.uk/software-update-for-humax-hdr-1000s-available-from-today/
[see comments]
ideally the disk shouldn’t be allowed to go over 95% full as it will start to affect peformance. 11GB free from 2TB is nothing and manually deleting several hours will only add another 6-8GB.
I don’t have a hdr1000s and it’s pointless me testing on my other humaxes as they run different software; however if it were my box I’d cold reboot it first, i.e. unplug and then test it seeing as it’s almost full it wouldn’t take long. If it still didn’t autodelete I’d factory reset it and test again and if it still didn’t autodelete then it never will.
If it did start working after a reboot or a factory/default reset I’d test it again to see when autodelete actually kicked in. This would be useful for other users to know.
JungleMartin – 3 days ago »
It’s also simply quicker to not delete something than delete it.
Quite true but it is also quicker to not delete something than to “Keep” it.
(Granted that most people would do more of the former than the latter) so 6 of one and 3 dozen of the other but I’ll stick with my method for now as that actually works.So no news then ?
Thanks both for further replies. I had already tried the full power off at the wall for several minutes and unfortunately it made no difference. I don’t fancy the factory reset at this stage as we have ~50 scheduled series records which would be a pain to add again. (Plus, you can only add them if they are visible in the EPG which only holds the next seven days, i.e. you can’t re-add a series record (yet) for a programme that isn’t on for another two weeks, a month, etc.) Plus in my own mind I would doubt a factory reset would make a difference anyway.
What I have done for now is changed the standby mode from Power Save to Normal to see if that makes a difference – maybe it will have a bigger window of time in which to do housekeeping if it never goes into Power Save?
However, I have also manually deleted some more programmes to give us some more breathing space, so it will be a while before it gets very full again. I think we are currently at about 96%.
Interestingly, my wife reported that she had to power it off at the wall this evening as it would not wake up from standby. That was after me setting standby mode to Normal, which I did last night.
JungleMartin – 8 hours ago »
I don’t fancy the factory reset at this stage as we have ~50 scheduled series records which would be a pain to add again. Plus in my own mind I would doubt a factory reset would make a difference anyway.
I can understand with ~50 scheduled, it’s an ongoing humax problem after a retune or reset. On some of the other humax boxes it’s reported that too many scheduled entries can slow the box down. It would make sense to purge any schedule that you know has finished rather than wait the ~3 months for them to disappear, although I can’t imagine that would make much difference.
There’s no other way forward than a factory reset. After checking for latest software update and reboot the factory reset will solve most remaining issues. The file system will be in a mess after being filled up to 100% too many times, ideally it shouldn’t go over ~95%.
What is clear is that the auto delete doesn’t currently work and if a factory reset doesn’t fix it then nothing will.
In an ideal world, it’d be factory reset, tested to see if and when auto delete kicks in, take the drive out, copy recording off (directly assuming it’s standard ext? or via usb?), format so the disk is clean, copy recording back, factory reset, test auto delete again, remove unwanted recordings, put/type schedule back.
That’s what I would do; however I can understand why most people wouldn’t do it and take the view it shouldn’t be necessary.
If you purge the schedule and you’re left with ~20 – 30 then you probably won’t have a window to do any disk work anyway. With auto delete on presumably you’re not worried about ~50% of the content on the disk. Running it at 96 – 100% capacity will only lead to further problems.
It’ll be interesting to see if powersave on/off makes any difference, also it’s not clear from the post whether auto delete has ever worked? if it used to and powersave makes no difference then the answer is clear
I’ll get the missus to have a clear out of the scheduled recordings. Might then take photos of what’s left and do the factory reset to see if it makes any difference. What else will be lost other than planned recordings – just any settings we’ve changed?
Damian, out of interest, where does your 95% figure come from?
JungleMartin – 11 hours ago »
Damian, out of interest, where does your 95% figure come from?
Good Question and I’m assuming the box still uses ext3:
From wikipedia:
“While ext3 is resistant to file fragmentation, ext3 can get fragmented over time or for specific usage patterns, like slowly writing large files”
From Linux Magazine:
“Fragmentation is something that primarily affects larger files that will not fit completely into the free space on a hard drive because of a lack of sufficiently large, contiguous space; thus, a file will reside in different segments”
The lone sysadmin:
“It’s actually quite easy to generate a fragmented disk on NTFS or ext3 filesystems. Fragmentation happens when you don’t have much free space on disk and a filesystem is forced to use non-contiguous blocks to fulfill requests.”
Web upd8:
“I know everybody says EXT3 and EXT4 filesystems don’t need defragmentation and in most cases, that’s true! But sometimes they actually do need defragmentation. I’ve recently scanned my drives and found 1 partition (which hasn’t been formatted in a very very long time) having a fragmentation level of over 70%”
Writing large files to disk is exactly what the Humax does and there’s no way to check fragmentation without access to the disk and no easy way to defrag. My files tend to be around 1GB for 1/2hr programme, ~4GB – film, sporting event 8GB – 12GB. The biggest advantage ext3 has over ext2 is it’s journaled, but it’s not magic and it will become heavily fragmented if allowed to fill up which is why some users problems disappear with a format as you’ve mentioned. Stay under 95% and there should be enough free contiguous blocks to stop/hinder fragmentation.
You are, as the disk is so full and after a factory reset, in an ideal position to check if and when auto delete kicks in. If you can get access to the disk then run a e2fsck against it and let us all know the results. The only effective way to defrag is to copy off what you want to keep and re-format.
For others, if the disk has filled up once or twice and the disk has been kept under ~95% for the rest of the time then it shouldn’t be a problem and no need to worry.
And yes, unfortunately, reset will lose the planned recordings schedule, force a retune and settings.
I’ve never used auto delete and I’m sort of 50/50 on whether it actually works and if so at what level it kicks in. Personally I’d find locking files I want to keep much more of a pain than deleting stuff I no longer want, but each to their own. I’d imagine a reboot (power off) would bring the auto delete process back into sync with the file system, but this clearly hasn’t worked.
Let us know how you get on.
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