It appears my 4th gen Tablo can only store a few multiple-hour football games, and maybe another hour or two on top of that. Oddly, my hard drive only says it’s 30% used at any one point, so I wouldn’t think it would need to delete these for space reasons.
Any idea how I can keep my shows longer than a few days?
What size storage did you add as the “number of hours” is really just a GUESS as all depends on what the channels broadcast at and things like that. So 50 hours on channel B and 15 hours channel H and things like that are more realistic.
I had a 5Tb HD on mine.
I think this just happened to me. Had several episodes of different shows disappear all of a sudden. I have a 1tb drive attached to my 4 tuner 4th gen. Never showed much more than 50% storage used. Auto delete was turned on, but just turned it off. This feels like a bug to me.
Hi @Jeff_Hager ,
Sorry you’re running into that.
Did the shows vanish all at once? Are they still vanishing after turning off Auto Delete?
I don’t know if they all deleted at once. My guess is that it was progressive as space was deemed needed. We tried to watch something the other night from the library and that’s when we noticed that several older episodes from multiple shows were missing. Did notice one additional episode disappear as we were trying to figure what was going on. I have a 1tb drive connected and about 50-60 episodes of various shows recorded as of today. It was probably 100+ episodes recorded before they started rapidly deleting.
Any time I’ve looked at the storage space in the past, it always hovered around 50% available, so I always assumed I had plenty of space left.
After turning off the Auto Delete, I noticed last night that the available space dropped to around 35%. Looking again this morning, I was down to 25%. Nothing new was recorded overnight and probably not much last evening.
Finally decided to reboot the Tablo this morning. Now when I look at my available space, it jumped up to 82% available, which makes a whole lot more sense based on drive size and what’s shown for recordings.
If I were to guess for debugging purposes, I’d have to guess it’s a caching issue when watching live TV, and something not releasing the storage. I have at least 5 TV’s that regularly access Tablo. I know it tends to get angry and “runs out of space” if I leave the TV on a channel for several hours at a time. Kind of weird and I periodically have to back out to the guide and pick the channel again or flip between channels to release the tuner and continue watching the channel again. Rather than store the entire duration that I’m watching a live channel, I’d be fine with it only storing up to an hour and only being able to rewind live TV up to an hour. I also know that if I leave the Tablo app while it’s on a live channel (on FireTV devices), come back a day later and open the Tablo app, it tries to pick up exactly where I left off, like it cached the live show I was watching yesterday, paused it, and tried to resume. It will will play that show from the day before for maybe 15 minutes before the cached buffer runs out and throws an error. I kind of wish it would eventually kill off the process, reset back to the home screen, and remove that temp live TV storage from memory.
Overall, I feel like one of more of the tuners may have kept recording live tv when nobody was actually watching and that’s what filled up the hard drive. We recently had a guest and they may have regularly left the live TV going in the Tablo app on the FireTV stick while only turning the TV off. They also pretty much had live TV going all day every day. That may be why this was a new and sudden problem, because we usually have a habit of leaving the Tablo app before turning the TV off, but this was a different usage pattern. The reboot this morning must have released that temp storage and that’s why I have a ton of space available again.
Does Auto Delete factor in upcoming recordings and try to make space available for future recordings, or is it only concerned with the space needed at the present moment? My original thought was that with Fall television there are a lot more upcoming episodes now. But that theory didn’t quite make sense when it said I had 500gb available. all the time. I’ve read that the Tablo attempts to leave some storage available at all times. I assume to factor in live TV storage buffer, but 500gb seems excessive there too.
So, I’m guessing there is a bug somewhere, but I would lean towards something with Live TV caching or buffering that gets excessive and doesn’t release the storage until a reboot.
I didn’t notice any further deleting after turning off Auto Delete, but I didn’t inventory what was recorded either. At the rate storage was being used up before the reboot this morning, I’m sure more would have eventually gotten deleted.