Today’s question comes from Charlie, who asks, “How does auto-delete work on Tablo? I find when I have it enabled, it sometimes deletes shows before I can watch them, even though the app says I have space available.”
Tablo’s auto-delete feature ensures the minimum required amount of recording storage space is always free on your hard drive.
If your recording storage is completely full, it won’t just prevent new recordings from being saved. Storage is also used to create a buffer for live TV so you can pause, rewind and fast-forward. When it’s maxed out, it will also keep you from playing live TV.
To ensure your recording schedules and TV viewing run smoothly, this feature is enabled by default on all 4th Generation Tablo devices.
How Auto-Delete Is Tuned
The auto-delete feature is adjusted based on the size of your Tablo’s onboard memory or USB-connected hard drive, as well as the number of tuners it has.
When using onboard storage, Tablo will maintain 2 hours of free storage per tuner. On larger USB-connected drives, a larger amount of free storage will be maintained.
Each live TV channel being watched will also reserve an additional hour of space.
While you can see details about how much recording storage space is being used within the SETTINGS and LIBRARY screens of the Tablo app, this reserved space isn’t reflected. So even if you think you have several GBs of storage remaining, the total available amount could be much smaller.
How Auto-Delete Works
The auto-delete feature is triggered when Tablo detects that there isn’t enough reserved recording storage space for:
- A scheduled recording that is about to start
- A new recording schedule is set for a program currently airing
- A request to play a live TV channel
At that point, Tablo will automatically delete as many saved recordings as necessary to free up the required space, starting with the oldest unprotected programs.
Along with protected recordings, recordings within a series where a keep limit has been set will also not be eligible to be removed by auto-delete.
If you rely on onboard storage. you should use these features sparingly, as they could reserve so much space for protected/kept recordings that auto-delete is forced to remove newer recordings before you can watch them.
If you run into that issue frequently, or like to record a lot of programs, consider expanding your Tablo’s recording storage with a USB hard drive. It’s relatively affordable and easy to set up.
Have a question about watching TV that you’d like answered? Send us a note and you may see your question on the Tablo blog and in an upcoming issue of our newsletter, Stay Tuned!
