I had been recording episodes of The Great British Bake-Off which air on PBS using Plex DVR. When establishing the recording schedule I used the advanced settings menu to specify keeping only the 3 most recent episodes. I do this for most series because Plex doesn’t seem to have a global rule to delete the oldest recordings (across all shows) when the recorder storage drive is full. Eventually I decided to get all previously-aired seasons of The Great British Bake-Off and manually loaded them up into Plex. Unfortunately the next time the DVR recorded an episode of that show, it deleted all the 8 full seasons that I had just added, even though they were contained in a different library.
I’m filing this under feature requests because, after some searching through the settings, I realize this is not a bug. I was surprised to learn that the advanced setting I specified – keep the latest 3 episodes, seems to be a global setting for the show, no matter which library it was in, or whether the DVR made the recording.
I tend to think of DVR recordings as ephemeral, and I don’t mind them being deleted when space is needed to make new recordings. All of the previous DVR solutions I’ve used have worked this way, and when I first learned that Plex DVR didn’t I found it to be a stunningly obvious oversight.
First and foremost I’d like a global rule which allows Plex to delete episodes of DVR-ed media when the drive fills up (or a specified storage limit is reached.) This way I won’t have to worry about setting advanced rules for each show, or risk having recordings fail due to lack of storage.
Second, I’d like there to be a distinction between DVR-recorded shows and shows added by other means. In my opinion, DVR recording rules should only be able to delete DVR-recorded media. Perhaps this is a coding or organizational challenge when these shows are contained in the same library, but it would be really nice if these rules could be applied on a per-library basis. If this is an insurmountable challenge I think it’s a mistake to commingle DVR and non-DVR media going forward. Perhaps DVR TV and DVR Movies should simply be default required libraries for anyone using this feature.
