All available drive space being used up since custom firmware upgrade

S

scotchthistle

New Member
Hi All, got an issue with drive space since I upgraded my foxsat-hdr to the latest custom firmware. Whenever I delete video and gain free drive space, it gets gobbled up by something running on the box, so I have literally no drive space left at all and the capacity is 100%. I deleted over 20GB the other day and this was gone again instantly despite me not recording anything else to the box! I was wondering if this is due to the Twonky media server running, does this use up all drive space unless you limit it (I haven't looked to see if there is a restriction on how much drive space it can use)? Or could it be due to the custom firmware or custom apps not liking me completely powered off the foxsat-hdr overnight? Generally I switch off completely overnight if I don't need to use it to save on the electric bill. There also seems to be a big discrepancy between the HD space used at the top of the web config page and the actual size of all the video currently on the drive (I manually calculated the video and it was over 20GB less than the stated total video used at the top of the page!). I've got a 1TB drive and I'm running custom firmware v4.1.2. I've now disabled all services on the box other than Samba, Mongoose and telnet to try and prevent all free drive space being eaten up. Any advice would be appreciated, Cheers! :)
 
The Custom Firmware is not going to take up Gigabytes of space, the only things that will do that are recordings, you will have to bite the bullet and clear some more recordings from your hard disk, removing 20GB may sound a lot, but it means the drive is 98% full
 
I removed another 70GB overnight so we'll see if that space gets eaten up without any fresh recordings. The video partition is running at 91% free now. Still would like an explanation as to why the space is being used up without any fresh recordings going on the box. One of the new processes or apps under the custom firmware must be eating it up. Does anyone have any idea of how much space the apps take up?
 
Also, why is there a discrepancy between the actual true space taken up by videos and the figure displayed at the top of the web config page, big difference here, there must be a bug somewhere that is incorrectly calculating the size of the video on the foxsat-hdr? It's really frustrating as I keep running out of disk space to record programmes!
 
scotchthistle said:
There also seems to be a big discrepancy between the HD space used at the top of the web config page and the actual size of all the video currently on the drive (I manually calculated the video and it was over 20GB less than the stated total video used at the top of the page!). I've got a 1TB drive ...
Click to expand...
Depends on how the calculation is done. Some use base 2 where 1k = 1024 bytes and others use base 10 where 1k is 1000 bytes. The difference is about 2.4%. Taking your figures of 20Gb difference on a 1Tb disk, that's about 2% in my calculation. Disk manufacturers usually seem to use base 10 as it makes their disks sound bigger than their actual capacity. Which is why, when you format (say) a 1TB disk, the formatted size is always less than 1Tb. Like my 750Gb disk only has 698Gb available (about 7% less)
Of course, there is also the possibility that I'm talking out of my bum.
 
OK, please see below for images of what I mean as I don't think you know what I mean Trev. The Humax foxsat-hdr web portal reckons there is Total space: 890.2 GB Used: 814.7 GB (91.5%) but when I calculate the total size of all the video listed in the second image it only comes to 790.5GB which is a discrepancy of 24.2GB which is unaccounted for and lends support to my theory that some process or app on the box is using up disk space instead of releasing it for video recording use. This is around the amount I freed up the day before last that was instantly used up without any additional video being recorded or anything else added to the box by myself or recording schedule. Since I stopped all processes apart from telnet, mongoose & samba yesterday & then deleted additional video it has registered that additional free space & it hasn't been used up by any mystery process but the box has still not released the 24.2GB for recording use. Hopefully that makes more sense!
 

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The web Interface pie chart is based on the disk space of the video partition, extracted from the linux command df /mnt/hd3 which returns used and available sizes in kilobytes. This figure is then divided by 1048576 (1024 * 1024) to display the result in gigabytes. How the HDR itself determines free and used space is anybodies guess. The size of individual recordings, as listed in the web interface, is determined purely from the main .ts video file. It does not include the .nts and .hmt file sizes, nor the thumbnail .tac file sizes. Also, the live pause buffer file 0.ts is not shown in the web interface media list, and this file alone can be as large as 18 GB. This will account for the discrepancy you are describing. The custom firmware and applications do not even reside on the same partition as the Video folder. The only thing that could ever account for apparent loss of space is if you were to use the 'Convert Files' plug-in, with the backup option enabled. This would double the space used for each converted recording.
 
Thanks Raydon, that's cleared that up! Must have been the convert files plug-in that ate the space. I turned it off the other day, so it shouldn't use up anymore space. How do I go about deleting the converted recordings? What file type should I be looking for?
 
Does anyone ever bother to read the documentation ?

Extract from the Convert Files Plug-in Docs:

There is a checkbox which enables or disables the keeping of backups of the original recording. If this box is checked a backup will be placed in the folder .BACKUP created under the same folder as the original recording. This folder will be hidden from the HDR's own Media Browser view, so any deletion of backups must be done via FTP, samba share, or from a telnet session.

So, if you want to remove them all just delete any .BACKUP folder you find.
 
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