# Recover permanently deleted shows before new recordings are made?



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

I presume the answer is no.

This is NOT manually “permanently delete”-ing shows, but my TiVo nuked over 25% of my recordings when I tried to transfer BACK a ~3 gig recording with pytivo. Oh, and the transfer actually didn’t happen. It put it on the to do list for some reason even though nothing else was happening. So I deleted it from to do and rebooted to hopefully interrupt a “go delete stuff” operation.

I turned off suggestions, but will let other recordings happen. Since it was almost all old stuff, I don’t care TOO much about most of it, but if there is a way to recover in a computer, great.

I know the actual recordings are encrypted, I just don’t know if the directory structure, etc is known to fix that way.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

No is correct. Once its deleted from the Recently Deleted folder, its gone for good.
Tivo almost always over estimates the space it needs. Transfer a .mp4 video and it gets transcoded to MPEG2 and size is 4-6x more then its original.

I think you need to upgrade the drive if it is deleting shows you want to keep on the Tivo.


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## techpro2004 (Oct 14, 2019)

not sure if this would work but have you tried pulling the drive from your tivo, connecting it to a linux pc and running testdisk?


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

What does that do? Does it recover shows?


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

I'm sure it only test the integrity of the drive.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

ThAbtO said:


> No is correct. Once its deleted from the Recently Deleted folder, its gone for good.
> Tivo almost always over estimates the space it needs. Transfer a .mp4 video and it gets transcoded to MPEG2 and size is 4-6x more then its original.
> 
> I think you need to upgrade the drive if it is deleting shows you want to keep on the Tivo.


again, it was never actually in the recently deleted folder. I was using that as an analogy because people would want to say "go into Recently Deleted" if I simply mentioned deleted shows.

it overestimates, but this was like 2 orders of magnitude too much, and it never actually even started the transfer.

The main thing I wanted to recover was a whole bunch of the last Letterman episodes.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Even when it over estimates the space it needs for the recording/transfer, it would clear out the RD folder first, then it attacks suggestions, followed by any oldest? shows. It can even skip that RD folder.

If the transfer did not start, but is in the TD list, reboot the Tivo and it would start momentarily. The transfer server tends to crash.


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## techpro2004 (Oct 14, 2019)

testdisk is a forensics utility that recovers deleted files on many different file systems. I have never used it with a tivo and do not know if it is compatible. it runs on linux so you must be comfortable with that and it requires that the drive must be directly connected to the system it runs on. It also requires a destination drive that is as big or bigger than the source. I don't know what format the recordings are stored in on the hard drive or if they are decode-able/playable on a pc but it is my go to utility for recovering deleted files.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

As the Tivo drive is encoded so the shows are only playable from that DVR that recorded/transferred to. There are no actual files to retrieve.


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## techpro2004 (Oct 14, 2019)

Even if they are coppy-freely or ota? If so then how does tivo2go work.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Tivo drive is encoded with its TSN when it records, on transfers, decodes the TSN and encodes with the MAK and produces a .TiVo file.

Which is why you just cannot swap Tivo drives and expect the shows to play on this other Tivo, which has a different TSN.


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## techpro2004 (Oct 14, 2019)

I understand, forget my suggestion. I am new to tivo.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

ThAbtO said:


> As the Tivo drive is encoded so the shows are only playable from that DVR that recorded/transferred to. There are no actual files to retrieve.


Though that's what I was originally asking.. since people figured out expansion tools, etc., I thought they had to have figured something out about the filesystem..

(I bet someone knows, they just aren't saying..)

anyway, I've given it up.. sigh.. I already knew I could get *one* show I lost on dvd if I really really wanted.. but it was mostly the last *bunch* (not hundreds, but a few months!! in SD) of Letterman shows..

damn yeah I should keep until I delete everything... But then it gets so aggravating when one is 'near' full...

and in this case they were deleted BECAUSE OF A TIVO BUG. I had counted up things in RD & Suggestions and it was several times what I was transferring.. but it literally deleted *hundreds* of gigs of stuff.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

There's enough known about the MFS file system to physically copy the recordings, but nobody has ever cracked the encryption.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

yeah but that's my point.. I am not/wasn't trying to crack the *encryption*.. unless the directory structure itself is encrypted too.. (unlikely)..

again, I've given the entire idea up.. but just like you can scan computer hard drives of various OSes and "recover erased files", I thought this might be do-able too..

yeah I know Tivos use some kind of database weirdness, etc..


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

mattack said:


> T
> and in this case they were deleted BECAUSE OF A TIVO BUG. I had counted up things in RD & Suggestions and it was several times what I was transferring.. but it literally deleted *hundreds* of gigs of stuff.


I don't think this is a TiVo bug. This has been reported here as an issue related to using "newer" versions of FFmpeg.

Scott


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Do you know if anybody's looking into it?

guess I should go back to the old ffmpeg (and yes, change ALL of my recordings to keep until I delete -- can kmttg do that?) for now..

is it that ffmpeg is reporting the wrong size up the chain that then gets sent to the tivo as a huuuuuge size needed?

I had _guessed_ it was a Tivo bug because I'd run into tivo requiring WAY more (but not this much more) space than "needed".. like several times to 10x more space than the show I was going to transfer.. but it had gotten better in recent years and/or I had gotten used to it.. so I was living on the edge and it finally bit me.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

I sure wish that the Tivo would only delete for actual space needed, instead of "Block" delete where its not required.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Yeah, even with this bug, if the tivo only started deleting shows _as it received data_ (i.e. the show being transferred), then in theory it wouldn't've actually deleted too many shows..

i.e. even if in theory it said "this is a bajillion gigabytes" but only sent 1.5 GB, if it only deleted 1.5GB of space if needed.. no problem... Though even _ignoring_ this specific issue, it used to be worse than it is "normally" now.

Because I think I got complacent because I was able to transfer shows even with the slightly-incorrect 99% or 100% showing in the tivo space bar __because I knew there were many gigs of things in the recently deleted_ or suggestions.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

mattack said:


> Do you know if anybody's looking into it?
> 
> guess I should go back to the old ffmpeg (and yes, change ALL of my recordings to keep until I delete -- can kmttg do that?) for now..
> 
> ...


Sorry for the late response. Seems like this has been reported as an issue for a while so I doubt anyone is looking at it and no idea the real cause (I assume it's reporting the wrong size which is causing the issue).

I do recall someone posting an ffmpeg configuration setting that helped with this but not sure I can find the post.

Scott


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Actually, I don't think I am using a new ffmpeg.. I thought I was, since I remember it being mentioned as a reason why some shows that I had transferred from Tivo wouldn't transfer back (I see some kind of video mpeg error right at the beginning).

It was built in 2013 so it's not the new one, right?

This is just the binary IN my pytivo folder.
ffmpeg version 1.1-pytivo Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the FFmpeg developers

built on Jan 8 2013 15:00:31 with gcc 4.7.2 (MacPorts gcc47 4.7.2_2+universal)


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

That's almost as old as the one that I'm using with my original pyTivo install on my Windows Home Server.

C:\Program Files\pyTivo\bin>ffmpeg /?
ffmpeg version N-44123-g5d55830 Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers
built on Sep 2 2012 20:23:29 with gcc 4.7.1 (GCC)

I can't recall when this first started to be reported as a problem but thought it was much later so maybe this wasn't your issue. I've never seen the problem and regularly run our TiVo's pretty full, but I also convert anything that didn't come from our TiVo's originally to an MPEG2 format with VideoRedo so it's not transcoded when uploaded.

Scott


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I think I stole the ffmpeg build directly from the pyTivo repo because I didn’t want there to be any conflict. I didn’t write most of pyTivo, I just packaged it up into an easier to run executable. Newer versions of ffmpeg have changes to the CLI and I didn’t want to have to modify that portion of pyTivo to make it work.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Though I wonder if my issue is maybe because I tried to transfer a TS program back? I honestly don't know if I've ever done that before. Most of my recordings are straight MPEG, either from the OTA channels or the SD channels which are still regular MPEG and I can download in program stream..


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