There is another way to keep podcasts forever. You can click on the status of any downloaded podcast and it will change status to "keep forever". This works for all podcasts, no matter where the files reside, so long as they have been imported into Media Center. The hazard there is that the "keep forever" status is kept in your Media Center library, not in the podcast itself, so that if you were to copy the file again (say to a new directory) and import it again, the "keep forever" status would be lost.
You could still lose podcast episodes in the following scenario:
- You have a collection of podcast files that are eligible to be deleted, but have not been deleted only because of their "keep forever" status.
- You move the podcast files to a new directory with (for example) Windows Explorer.
- You import the new directory causing Media Center to discover their podcast tags.
- Media Center updates the podcast, honors the file tags, and deletes the files.
This won't happen if you move the files with Media Center, since Media Center would retain the "keep forever" status when the files are moved. However, if for some reason your Media Center library was lost or corrupted, the files would be deleted.
Frankly the original author did not foresee what you wanted to do here, and today there is no foolproof solution I could discover. The ideal solution would be to somehow change the tags in the file. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to do this. You can change most tags in a file, but you cannot delete the Podcast Feed or Podcast Episode tags; this would be a reasonable workaround. Better would be to have a "keep forever" tag in the file, but this is not a current feature of Media Center.
However, if you are prescient enough to realize your library is lost or corrupted, you can still avoid deleting the files. The way to do that is to go into the Podcast options menu and tell Media Center not to delete files unless their total size exceeds and unreasonably large number, (999,999 GB). That will turn off all deletion. You can then safely do the import. Instead of deleting the files, Media Center will show their status as "to be deleted". You then can sort the files by their resident directory, and click on all the "to be deleted" status entries, changing them to "keep forever". That manual operation complete, you can now go back to the Podcast options menu and restore set the delete size back to something reasonable.
The solution above requires extraordinary diligence by the user, and so it is not really practical. An alternative, but slightly awkward solution is to leave the delete file size unreasonably high all the time, except for when you find yourself in need of disk space, and then temporarily drop the delete size for a minute or two. When you drop the delete size, Media Center will immediately honor the request, and then you can raise it back up to your normal high value.
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Topic: Podcast Downloads: remembering what has been downloaded (Read 3321 times)