Infuse lose all my metadata randomly

Update: We’ve addressed one issue that was resulting in this issue appearing for some people.

This fix will be available in 5.5, which we’re hoping to have out next week. :slight_smile:

Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for the update James. Your hard work is much appreciated!

Hi James still happening on infuse 5.5.5 … today just open infuse and no data (check the last update “NEVER” legend), i didn’t update apps nothing from yesterday =(

If you have a chance to send in a report, we can take a look.

Yup, the code is MVD4J … thanks !!!

(Also posted in another thread)
Just going to add my experience with this issue in the hope that it may help with a solution.

We have 3 older ATVs running infuse and 1 4K ATV.
This issue has only occurred on the new 4K ATV (twice).
The issue seemed to occur after Infuse was updated.
My 4K ATV is the 32GB model and looking at storage (using TVStorageInfo app), it normally has approx 15GB utilised out of the 29GB available.
Most of this space is taken by metadata, as I have only 2 other small apps on the ATV, besides Infuse.
After the last loss of metatdata, I looked at the storage available, and there was virtually none left, despite me not installing / uploading anything.
After doing a simple restart, the storage went down to very little used (can’t remember exactly how much).

Theory - for some reason, after the Infuse update, it has tried to duplicate the archive of metadata and run out of space, therefore triggering the deletion of the archive.
? When an app updates, does it replicate the archive before deleting the old version?

Hope this helps.

Hi James, and it happened again, it’s very disappointing to have to wait for the whole library to reinsert itself again, I have a big film catalog and it takes hours to do this again.

Here the new report and few images:

Have you updated to 5.6.1 yet? It had some library improvements included.

Yup im running “Infuse Pro 5.6.1”, this loss could have been caused by the update of this version?

That I don’t know, it didn’t cause me any problems but I’m sure James will be chiming in when he can. These are the most difficult problems to fix since not everyone is experiencing them and the causes could be external to Infuse. Heck if another app gets greedy and eats a bunch of memory then Infuse could pay the price by loosing the metadata.

Glad I’m not relying on software engineering to put bread on the table.

5.6.1 includes a number of optimizations so Infuse will take up less space, but the root issue here is that your Apple TV is running out of space which is causing it to remove info cached by Infuse and other apps.

Infuse is pretty efficient with the space it uses, but some Apple TV apps can be surprisingly large (for example, a certain fireplace app takes up over 1GB of space).

It might not be a bad idea to look at the apps you have installed, and remove any you don’t find yourself using. Otherwise, investing in a 64GB model might not be a bad idea.

Hi James, I understand the problem is the way ATV4 manages disk space, but it seems weird since I only use my ATV4 for Infuse and very much less frequently Netflix.
I think an Infuse update (5.6.1) shouldn’t take much disk space and I think I it is not the cause of disk filling.

Please see the storage usage details image after reindexing the library (I also leave the list of installed applications).

Maybe it would be a good feature to store metadata on an external storage media instead of using ATV4 internal disk, especially for people owning the 32GB model.

Honestly I see it weird to run out of space when there are 6GB free with the library already indexed.
Thanks, I’ll be waiting for your response

It’s hard to say what the actual threshold is, as this is undocumented and wholly determined by Apple. If you’re only using Infuse and Netflix it would be interesting to find out what is taking up all that storage. Is that app able to give you a breakdown of how much each app is using?

As a frame of reference, Infuse libraries are generally under 1 GB. Anything over 1GB generally means you have a lot of files (see here: Metadata Storage is Adding Up - #13 by eyealar). I don’t think we’ve seen a library over 2GB (especially now with 5.6.1), but I suppose it’s possible.

Hi, there is no way I can see details of the space used by each app, I just can see only total values. I have 1325 movies and 1292 series as seen in the image, they can add some GB, but it would be interesting to know what is taking the storage since as you could see I have almost nothing installed.

Is there any way you can log how much storage is used by your app in your report?

What do you think about storing metadata on external storage?

That’s a good size library, so I’d guess Infuses is using 1-2 GB for metadata/artwork.

Storing metadata on an external device isn’t really a good option, as it would require download each time the app is opened, and this will slow things down quite a bit - especially with larger libraries like yours.

Is there a way to go local caching with a backup on an external device? I can download 2GB of metadata from my NAS in a minute while rescaping everything takes 45 minutes.

Hi Tim, is a good feature to have … I have a similar configuration like yours all wired over with ethernet at 1 Gigabit, It will great get an alternative to store metadata outside of infuse to prevent issues like these

No, its not the problem of the Apple TV that the data are lost. I have enough free space on the device, but after the update I have no metadata. In the last month I have problems after every update, and the support dont answer. I think, there must be a better quality assurance and a beta program for testing. We are your customers and not testers.

The main problem of the most people ist: Why we cant backup the metadata and why the support needs weeks to answer?

I can’t speak to your particular case, but in all of the recent reports we have seen the Apple TV disk was 80-90% full before tvOS decided to do some housecleaning to free up space. It’s still unclear as to what is filling up this space. Unless you have an absolutely massive library, Infuse will use under 2GB, and for 90% of users it will be under 1GB.

Hi. Just bought my Apple TV4K a few days ago, set up Infuse and was happy till next day when all my metadata was gone and the app started to re-download everything again. What’s interesting is that during this time I’ve tried to download Netflix app and App store said that I don’t have storage space. Now I only have 3-4 apps installed (and Storage Doctor is now showing that I have 24gb free out of 32gb). But once Infuse stopped rebuilding library I was able to download again. Same as to what has happened to one of the members in this thread (post #26). Not sure what the issue is, my library is quite small (<50 videos) and is on HDD connected to router and to Infuse over NFS.

Submitted ticket: 73TZ3