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Hello,

Is it ok to delete the .DAT files in my podtrapper folder (Blackberry Storm 9530)? Right now its about 50mb worth of files and alot of them are old. I have podtrapper set to delete a podcast after i delete it and these files are still there even though I have not downloaded any podcasts today. Any idea?


Thanks.

I suppose it depends on which .DAT files you're deleting. If you're referring to the PT_E_*.mp3.dat files, those correspond to podcast episodes and are probably safe to delete. PT_B_*.dat are backups of podtrapper settings, and should be safe to delete if you don't want them anymore (I'd keep the most recent backups though). I wouldn't mess with the others (PT_T_*.dat, PT_TEMP_*.dat, etc) unless Marcus says its safe.

You can tell Podtrapper can delete unused files. Go to settings -> Storage Settings -> "Prune orphaned files" (from the menu). I'm not sure how complete this is, but you can use it to free up some space without accidentally deleting any important files.

EDIT: I ran the "Prune" routine and it deleted all my PT_TEMP_*.dat files (~400). I'm not sure if it deleted any others, and I didn't compare free space before/after. They should be safe to delete manually.

It looks like all my backups are still there (going back to 1.7.2), so you'll have to delete those manually if you don't want them.

All the PT_T_*.dat files seem to still be there. My hunch is they keep track of the podcast feeds, based on a rough estimate of quantity, and process of elimination. I wouldn't delete those.
/EDIT

The pruner should clear out any un-associated files, including old episodes. Basically anything PodTrapper isn't expecting to be there. It will keep any files that are supposed to be there, though, like current episodes, thumbnails, and backups. Andrew, you're probably seeing 400 temp files because of a bug that existed in an older beta, most users will only have as many of those as they have subscriptions.

The TEMP files are generally safe to delete, they're the xml from an update, stored on the SD card only to conserve RAM, and worst case will cause a pending or in process update to fail once. (Though they could be used for more in the future).

The PT_T_* files are actually the thumbnails, you should have one per subscription or so. (They're kept even if disabled, though I may change that now that I think about it). They're safe to delete if you want, if thumbnails are enabled they'll get redownloaded the next time a feed is updated.

So, in summary, these are what the files contain:
PT_B_* == Backups
PT_T_* == Thumbnails
PT_E_* == Actual podcasts
PT_TEMP == Temp files safe for delete

Hope this helps.

-Marcus

How can you convert the .DAT files to mp3 files? I would like to take the sd card from my BB and play it in another device.

javier wrote:How can you convert the .DAT files to mp3 files? I would like to take the sd card from my BB and play it in another device.

The file type isn't actually changed, so if your other media player can select a .dat file and has some intelligence to determine the actual file type, you shouldn't have to change anything. If that doesn't work...

Under PT playback settings, there's an option for "Show Files in Media Player". Change this to "Yes", and that should stop PT from renaming the podcast episodes to .DAT. This may have some playback implications, but I forgot what they are. Does the BBMP index them, causing a simultaneous access issue, or is this just to stop podcasts from playing in BBMP when most people just want to listen to music?

Not sure if changing this setting will remove the ".dat" from existing downloads. You can try. If it doesn't work, you can always just remove the ".dat" from the filename. Example: change "PT_E_x.mp3.dat" to "PT_E_x.mp3"