Coming soon to a TiVo near you: Undelete and Easy Delete.
TiVo has always encouraged its users to provide suggestions for future software versions. It even sponsors a forum for those who want to push their own pet “must have.”
One of the items that users have been clamoring for is a CTRL-Z (or Apple-Z for some of us) – the ability to bring back a program that was accidentally deleted, sometimes by a babysitter, sometimes by a two-year old who grabbed hold of a remote, sometimes by a spouse who “thought you weren’t interested in watching 24, sweetheart.”
Well, fight no more. If you have a standalone Series 2 TiVo DVR (i.e., a model starting with TCD, a Sony SVR3000 or a DVD player/burner with the TiVo service), your unit will soon automatically download software version 7.2.2.
This version of the software will create a new “Recently Deleted Items” folder, that will temporarily house the stuff that was tossed. So long as there is space available on your hard drive, you will be able to resurrect any program within that folder.
The software version also will create a one-key delete key, so that if you are in the Now Playing list, you can press clear and automatically delete a program without a confirmation screen. Makes sense, because if you blow it, you can simply head to the Recently Deleted folder and fix your mistake.
One interesting application of this new folder is a rather primitive, but plausible, way of gauging how much space you have left on your TiVo. Because the TiVo will remove items from the Recently Deleted folder first, you will not run out of recording space so long as you have items still stored in that folder. If you fear that you might be close, you can always count the number of hours stored in that folder to gauge roughly how much space you have left. This calculation can be difficult, though, if you are recording programming at different recording qualities. Up to four half-hour shows at basic quality will be wiped out with a single half-hour show recorded at best quality.