The "Logs" folder is using 60% of my recording drive. Safe to remove the content?

I'm running Channels DVR on an old MacBook with an external 4TB drive. My Logs folder is taking up about 40GB of space. Can I delete the two subfolders inside Logs called "comskip" and "recording"? Also there is a folder named "Streaming" taking up another 8GB. Any advice would be appreciated.

Sounds like it could be useful to lots of us, would you mind sharing the script?

Perhaps it’s something @bnhf can consider including in OliveTin.

I don't know if this is a good fit for OliveTin, but here's the little PowerShell command I run:

ForFiles /p "C:\{YOUR CHANNELS DVR PATH HERE}\Logs\recording" /s /d -7 /c "cmd /c del /q @file"

I just put that in Task Scheduler and set it up to run everyday at 3am. It's not super universal for people using Macs or Dockers or whatnot.

I'm assuming you already read this post above yours The "Logs" folder is using 60% of my recording drive. Safe to remove the content? - #6 by chDVRuser

Rather than repeat a topic here, see Channels Streaming Folders

Thanks for the reply. I deleted all files and folders inside the "recording" subfolder, but I have no idea if I can delete the contents of the "comskip" subfolder inside of Logs.

The only reason you would want to keep the comskip folder contents are if you plan on viewing the comskip log (video.log) for your recordings or taking advantage of any of the comskip generated output files in there. If you delete them and need one of the files later, just re-comskip the recording and they'll be generated again.

I consider the size relatively small. Here's an example from one of my four servers.
Capture

Comskip logs are also used for the commercial editor

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Thanks, didn't realize that!

I would not touch the Comskip folder ... these should be automatically removed when deleting the file ? or am I wrong in thinking they are ?

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Yes, once the recording is deleted, its comskip folder will be deleted along with its Streaming/m3u8 folder.

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On Window I use Robocopy ....

robocopy "Y:\ChannelsDVR\Logs" "C:\TempDir" /E /xd "Y:\ChannelsDVR\Logs\comskip" /move /minage:7
rmdir /s /q "C:\TempDir"

I think the answer to if this is a good fit for OliveTin lies in whether or not most people have their "dvr" folder setup as a network share. Or maybe another way to look at it is that if someone wants to use an OliveTin Action for this, they'd need to setup that folder as a share.

Portainer makes it pretty easy to create a volume that maps to a CIFS (SMB) or NFS share, and then that volume can be bound to a directory in OliveTin. With that in place, various maintenance scripts including the deletion of logs would pretty easy, and platform independent.

Does that appeal?

Yes. I would find this useful.

+1 (since I started this thread :wink:)

I'm doing some preliminary work to set this up with OliveTin, and I'd like to confirm with someone what to delete.

On my Channels DVR server, I have a folder called dvr/Logs/recording, and I'm assuming I want to delete all of the numbered directories underneath "recording" that are older than x days. It looks like each numbered folder only contains one file.

So in Bash, I'm thinking of a command like this:

find /mnt/dvr/Logs/recording -type d -mtime +7 -exec rm -r {} \;

Which should find all directories under "recording", and if they're more than 7 days old delete them and everything underneath them (recursively).

Just a question to the OP:

Which files in particular in the Logs directory are taking up all of the space? In each subdirectory under the comskip directory is a video.mpg file which may show as taking space (but actually isn't), but is only just a link/reference to the actual recording.

The idea that a bunch of text files are consuming 60% of your drive is ludicrous, so I thought perhaps this situation might just be a misunderstanding. (That's not to say it isn't possible, just merely improbable. If your text files are indeed consuming that much disk space, then I'll just retreat.)

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i do not have those in windows ...

It's the debug recording log files in Logs/recording
They can get quite large logging TVE and M3U recordings.

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Exactly. My only sources in Channels are TVE and M3U.

In the early days, after first signing up with Channels, I was recording a lot of TV shows and movies in order to start building a personal video library. What I mean by "a lot" is pretty much recording 24/7 for a few months.
It didn't take long before I filled a 5 TB drive, and another one. Eventually, I bought a 22 TB drive, which should keep me going for quite a while. These days, though, my DVR is not as busy as it was in the beginning so it's more manageable.

That explains how I got in this situation.

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See Storage of recording logs for TVE recordings - #5 by eric