T4 timeshift has stopped working

[Frozzix]

It was working ok.
Then today when I turned the T4 on there was a small error box message that said something about a disk being full up.
The message disappeared when I pressed OK and now I can't use timeshift or pause live TV.
In fact none of the buttons for using in live TV such as previous or next, up and down or the skip function do anything when pressed.
I've looked in the guide manual and this forum but I can't find any info to help me get my Timeshift/pause back.
Any help will be gratefully received.

[IanSav]

Hi Frozzix,

Have you cleared up some disk space to allow for the timeshift buffer? Remove some old or unwanted recordings to create some space for new recordings and the timeshift buffer.

Regards,
Ian.

[prl]

...
Then today when I turned the T4 on there was a small error box message that said something about a disk being full up.
...

Have you looked in the media player to see how much free disk space you have (bottom of the panel with the list of media)?

[MrQuade]

If you have cleared out the space on the HDD, you should be able to reboot the T4 for timeshift to come back.

I would have thought that timeshifting might reenable itself when you changed channel after clearing up the space, but perhaps it doesn't work that way.

[prl]

...
I would have thought that timeshifting might reenable itself when you changed channel after clearing up the space, but perhaps it doesn't work that way.

On a channel change, the timeshift buffer is cleared out and timeshift restarted. If there still isn't enough room, there should be a new error message.

Frozzix, was the error message "Write error while recording. Disk full?"? Or something else? Knowing exactly what the error message is helps work out what limit exactly is being exceeded, and may help point to the cause, if it's not simply that there isn't enough space to make the timeshift recordings (they have to go somewhere). If the disk is full, recordings won't be made, either.

[Frozzix]

Hi Frozzix,

Have you cleared up some disk space to allow for the timeshift buffer? Remove some old or unwanted recordings to create some space for new recordings and the timeshift buffer.

Regards,
Ian.

G'day Ian and everybody.
Every day I always completely empty trash.
But am I correct in thinking (now) that there is more manual deletions to do to open up disk space for the Timeshift to work.
Below my recordings I notice It says Available: 160 MB (0%)
I'm always wary to muck about with HDD settings incase I make myself problems I don't understand.
So can you tell me how to free up the space without losing all my settings or recordings.
Do I have to lose my Auto Timers or Timers.
If so, I can except that.

[MrQuade]

Below my recordings I notice It says Available: 160 MB (0%)
I'm always wary to muck about with HDD settings incase I make myself problems I don't understand.
So can you tell me how to free up the space without losing all my settings or recordings.
Do I have to lose my Auto Timers or Timers.
If so, I can except that.

If there is only 160MB left, then it means your HDD is effectively full of recordings.

You have some options:
1) Delete recordings to free up space
2) Move recordings to an external storage location
3) Upgrade the internal HDD to a larger model and copy the recordings from the old HDD.

You seem like you'd want number 2.

I think your best bet would be to buy a large external harddrive that can connect to the T4 using USB or eSATA.
You then have to move as many recordings as you can to the new external harddrive.

Some users have one or more external drives connected to their Wiz's since they record a lot of material.
You can leave the external drive attached to the T4 and play recordings from it as you normally would.

If you want to keep any recordings for long-term archiving, then you could optionally re-encode them to a more efficient format, though I have found that in practice, this doesn't usually save much space for FTA recordings (especially now that HD broadcasts are in the more efficient h.264 format already).

Failing that, you may have to ask yourself if you are ever going to get around to watching some of these recordings, and just deleting those that you think you may never get to.

[Gully]

Below my recordings I notice It says Available: 160 MB (0%)
I'm always wary to muck about with HDD settings incase I make myself problems I don't understand.
So can you tell me how to free up the space without losing all my settings or recordings.
Do I have to lose my Auto Timers or Timers.
If so, I can except that.

Well clearly 160MB is never going to be enough but what does the rest of the line say about disk size and trash?

And do you have a sense of how many recordings you have? How much space they are taking?

As has been posted already if you reboot and then check you should see the figures with minimal timeshift impact at that stage.

[prl]

Fozzix, do you have any recordings in directories directly in /media/hdd other than movies? E.g, something like /etc/hdd/Recordings or /media/hdd/Movies (case is significant!)? If so, they will have their own Trash and it may still be taking up space rather than the Trash in movies.

If so, to clear out all the trash on the HDD, go into the media player and navigate into /etc/hdd/movies, check the Trash usage at the bottom. If it's significantly large, clean the trash manually.

Then navigate to /media/hdd (one level up from /etc/hdd/movies), and check the trash there (it's a different Trash folder!) and empty it if necessary.

That shouldn't normally be the problem, because if in MEDIA, MENU>Settings, Disk space to reserve for Recordings (in GB) is not zero, the trashes should be cleaned out automatically if the free space falls below the value in the Disk space setting. The setting defaults to 40GB. If you've set it to 0, change it to something sensible.

Also, if you've disabled "Use trash in movie list" in that settings screen, that will disable automatic trash cleaning completely, so any trash that is there will not be looked at for potential deletion.

If you only have about 160MB of space left, that's about 10 min of MPEG2 SD recording and about half that for MPEG2 HD. More for MPEG4, but still way to little for a usable PVR.

[Frozzix]

Below my recordings I notice It says Available: 160 MB (0%)
I'm always wary to muck about with HDD settings incase I make myself problems I don't understand.
So can you tell me how to free up the space without losing all my settings or recordings.
Do I have to lose my Auto Timers or Timers.
If so, I can except that.

Well clearly 160MB is never going to be enough but what does the rest of the line say about disk size and trash?

And do you have a sense of how many recordings you have? How much space they are taking?

As has been posted already if you reboot and then check you should see the figures with minimal timeshift impact at that stage.

G'day Gully, thanks for your reply.
I've only got 8 hours of kept recordings and I've only got recordings to watch from last Friday the 21st July.
I have a Disk size of 2000 GB
After a reboot It now says Available: 382 GB (19 %)........Trash: 786 kB
The thing I can't work out is that I am recording, watching and deleting the same amount of TV content as I have done for the last 10 years.
Before getting this T4 I've only been using a 1 TB Expander (external) with a TiVo PVR and I never even came close to a storage capacity problem, even when recording and watching all available stuff during Soccer World Cups or Olympics etc.
I know frig all about Byte capacities but isn't 2000 GB twice the capacity of 1 TB.

Cheerz mate

[MrQuade]

I've only got 8 hours of kept recordings and I've only got recordings to watch from last Friday the 21st July.
I have a Disk size of 2000 GB
After a reboot It now says Available: 382 GB (19 %)........Trash: 786 kB

In that case, you need to follow prl's instructions.

If you only have 8 hours of recordings and have used more than 1.5TB of space on your disk, then there is stuff being left over in your trash folders somewhere.

[Gully]

G'day Gully, thanks for your reply.
I've only got 8 hours of kept recordings and I've only got recordings to watch from last Friday the 21st July.
I have a Disk size of 2000 GB
After a reboot It now says Available: 382 GB (19 %)........Trash: 786 kB
The thing I can't work out is that I am recording, watching and deleting the same amount of TV content as I have done for the last 10 years.
Before getting this T4 I've only been using a 1 TB Expander (external) with a TiVo PVR and I never even came close to a storage capacity problem, even when recording and watching all available stuff during Soccer World Cups or Olympics etc.
I know frig all about Byte capacities but isn't 2000 GB twice the capacity of 1 TB.

Cheerz mate

You're welcome and yes you are right on the capacity and you should still have plenty.

It can vary from broadcaster to broadcaster but if you say 2GB per hour, so say 3GB to allow for padding it should only be using around 24GB. Obviously there are other files including timeshift, etc.

SO going back to Peter's post on other folders, other trash, etc. you need to check you really have cleared everything out.

[prl]

I've only got 8 hours of kept recordings and I've only got recordings to watch from last Friday the 21st July.
I have a Disk size of 2000 GB
After a reboot It now says Available: 382 GB (19 %)........Trash: 786 kB

In that case, you need to follow prl's instructions.

If you only have 8 hours of recordings and have used more than 1.5TB of space on your disk, then there is stuff being left over in your trash folders somewhere.

Or, not in trash folders, but also not in /media/hdd/movies - perhaps in other directories in /media/hdd/movies or in subdirectories of /media/hdd/movies.

I don't think a reboot should have changed the amount of free space by itself unless some process was holding a deleted file open. But 380GB free should at least give you a bit of time to hunt down where the space has gone, but still be able to use the PVR.

8 hours of recordings should be something of the order of 15-20GB, depending on whether the recordings are SD or HD, MPEG2 or MPEG4. Definitely not 1500 GB or more. 1500 GB is something like 500-800 hours of recordings!

[prl]

It may be worthwhile checking that the timeshift directory isn't clogged up.

Restart the T4, wait about a minute for the timeshift cleanup to have completed, and then go to MENU>Sources / Files. Then navigate into T4 (Internal HDD), then into timeshift. There should be no more than about 10-15 files. If there's more than a screenful, especially if there's a lot more than a screenful, some of the missing space may be right there.

Don't just delete the files, that can make the timeshift system behave in unusual ways. You need to shut down timeshift before doing a manual cleanup here.

This shouldn't be a problem, but the space has to be going somewhere.

[Paul_oz53]

My bet is the problem is leaving the T4 on one channel for days. I did that with the T3 and filled a 2TB drive in a few days (or so it seemed).

Exactly the same outcome - failed recordings and no freespace. All the space was taken by timeshift! Changed channels and it resolved itself.

To prevent this happening I now use a pair of zap timers to swap the channels each day.
Paul

[MrQuade]

My bet is the problem is leaving the T4 on one channel for days. I did that with the T3 and filled a 2TB drive in a few days (or so it seemed).

Unlikely in this case as Frozzix has been watching his recordings, which will cause the timeshift buffer to clear regularly.

[j s]

My bet is the problem is leaving the T4 on one channel for days. I did that with the T3 and filled a 2TB drive in a few days (or so it seemed).

Exactly the same outcome - failed recordings and no freespace. All the space was taken by timeshift! Changed channels and it resolved itself.

To prevent this happening I now use a pair of zap timers to swap the channels each day.
Paul

I discovered this issue a few days ago - several shows didn't record and I soon found that "timeshift" was 1.6TB in size going back several weeks. (For various reasons I hadn't "watched" the T4 for quite a while, webif & wizos instead, so the live channel had not changed. It never occurred to me this would be a problem)

Is there not someway to limit the space (or time) timeshift will use? Surely a 24 hour limit would be more buffer than anyone could possibly want?

While the idea of a double zap will work one day that will bite me at the worst possible moment.

[MrQuade]

While the idea of a double zap will work one day that will bite me at the worst possible moment.

How about an auto-standby timer?
Set a repeating auto-standby timer for 720 minutes (12 hours). That way, timeshift will switch off after the T4 has been left idle for too long.

[prl]

Enhancement request #509: Allow user-specified size limit for timeshift buffer is intended to address this sort of problem.

[j s]

While the idea of a double zap will work one day that will bite me at the worst possible moment.

How about an auto-standby timer?
Set a repeating auto-standby timer for 720 minutes (12 hours). That way, timeshift will switch off after the T4 has been left idle for too long.

But I want it on for streaming purposes. I set up the double zap for 3am (an unlikely time to be watching).

Which reminds me that I need to do that again after finally doing the firmware upgrade.

[Grumpy_Geoff]

While the idea of a double zap will work one day that will bite me at the worst possible moment.

How about an auto-standby timer?
Set a repeating auto-standby timer for 720 minutes (12 hours). That way, timeshift will switch off after the T4 has been left idle for too long.

But I want it on for streaming purposes. I set up the double zap for 3am (an unlikely time to be watching).

You can still stream recorded programs from the T4 if it is in standby.

[MrQuade]

You can still stream recorded programs from the T4 if it is in standby.

And it's not just limited to recordings. You can also stream Live TV while it is in standby too!