Undelete a deleted recording

Add my vote for a Trash / Recycle Bin. Was cleaning recordings, had just cleared Season One of a show and didn’t realize the Table had jumped to Season Eleven instead of Season Two when I started cleaning more and deleted about eight current episodes before realizing the mistake. Could be over a year or so before those are re- broadcast. Nothing new recorded, so know data still there, but no way to get it back…

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/extundelete.1.html

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+1 for a “Recycling Bin” feature.

Here’s my reason I could have used this feature. About a year ago I was going through all the episodes for a particular show to make sure I had them all ripped before deleting them from Tablo. I was deleting all of seasons 2 through 6. After finishing season 2 I assumed it would jump up to season 3 and started deleting. Wrong assumption. It skips all the way up to the last/highest season and I deleted 9 episodes before I noticed I was in season 10 not 3. And I hadn’t ripped that season yet seeing as it was the current season and was not complete. I was not very happy. Now I’m waiting for them to replay season 10.

Been there, done that, which is why I use Tablo Ripper to do mass deletions now. You can easily delete exactly the episodes you choose by selecting (highlighting) and then right clicking on the highlighted episodes and selecting delete. Much simpler and safer than deleting one episode at a time through the Tablo app, as you experienced.

yes! I completely agree! …considering you’re (presumably) using a 3rd party app to export recordings – then use a tablo app to delete ?!?


nevertheless, yes for mass deleting, I don’t personally use Tablo Ripper, but I’ve found 3rd party apps providing a great deal more function and flexibility for, well this is a bit of an overstatement, power users. Because tablo still has obstacles and limitations as to what can be accomplished

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Two years of posts in this thread and still no undelete. I’m fairly new to Tablo so there must have been very few features before if this still is not making the cut. Oh well. Careful what you delete.

You can add me to the list of requesters. I don’t need/want the whole trash bin thing, but a single button at the top that would recover the last deleted video would be very helpful. I have occasionally deleted a video and then realized it was the wrong episode of a series.

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In reality, it’s still a “trash bin”, just maybe a very small one.

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Here here!

For a power user, mounting the Hard Drive and recovering the deleted files should be a piece of cake on another system; presumably Tablo doesn’t actually overwrite the files.

Another way of handling it on-device (given sufficient storage is provisioned) would be to kill the symlink to the recording, but preserve the inodes for 1-2 maintenance cycles.

It’s not guaranteed btw. Ext4 is a real filesystem, real in the not DOS-Windows way.

Recovering a deleted file might work, might not work. You’d have to catch it right away to have any chance and shut things down hard, because future file writes can use the blocks.

Stuff that is a bit easier on something that isn’t a “black box”. Even so, not guaranteed to work and arguably very very inconvenient.

Let me also add, that without database manipulation, not sure if the Tablo would see the recovered file anyhow.

There use to be a dual 64GB model, there still is a dual 128GB model, and you can attach any size USB HHD or SSD drive.

So why would those users want to waste space for a recycle bin?

I have auto-delete enabled and understand that the prompt to delete a file really means it’s gone.

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That’s really the “right” answer. But since people are used to the idea of a “collector” of deleted things that requires maintenance (e.g. Trash Can/Bin), it’s not an unreasonable request. But every extra bit of stuff adds weight with regards to the Tablo infrastructure. But still, it might be easy to do (might not).

Tablo uses the ext4 file system. This is a journaling file system where file inodes and journaling blocks be created at initialization.

As an example a dual 64GB only has 58.7GB of user space. A 1TB drive has 984GB of user space.

And since I’m not a video hoarder it’s not unusual for one of my units to have no recordings. Thus in that case all user data appears as free - unused. Thus I doubt there is anything much to a current concept of a recycle bin. Especially since HLS videos can contain hundreds if not thousands of .TS files.

Tablo can create all that it wants for a recycle bin as long as it’s optional.

You might be underestimating the code/logic/effort involved in creating an “undelete” feature.

Well, I used to work for a well-known storage vendor that uses a BSD based platform. It is entirely achievable with ext4, you basically “write around” the “deleted” file’s inodes, and add them to a delete queue, to be purged at a later date.

Could it be a “no maintenance required” self emptying recycle bin? Say after a certain time period it would start removing files. Also give it a limit like it only saves the last (number) of episodes. Or the last amount of data (size) deleted. The more you think about this the more there is to think about. :thinking:

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+1 here please add Undelete

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Of course the possibility exsist! As mentioned, recordings aren’t just a single file to recover, or even just the segments.

Once your reclaim all disk data then you need a reference for it… the DB info is stored internally. Not just it’s name, an episode for example, season number and everything about the entire series is interlinked, so you need to know how it fits in.

All of this is theoretically possible. I suspect it’s more overhead than tablo wants to invest while looking forward.

Nevertheless keep requesting, someday they may hear!

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I turn on auto-delete. And some user also mark episodes as protected. Many users have large disk drives. So why would tablo try to limit the number episodes or amount of data a program has used. Tablo is in the dvr business, which I suspect means recording OTA. It’s not a library system like Plex.

How hard can it be to every 5-10 days go into the settings page and read how much space is used/available. At some point the big bright light bulb comes on and indicates that a user has more recordings then they could possibly view in the rest of their lifetime.