Easy Sky TV trick unlocks extra storage for your recordings – you’ll run out fast if you don’t do it

RECORDING telly is one of the best features of a Sky box – but you might be doing it wrong.

If you’re always taping TV shows and movies, you’re at risk of running out of storage.

A standard Sky Q box has a terabyte of storage – equivalent to 1,000GB (gigabytes).

Only about 70% of that is actually usable for recordings, with an hour of TV typically taking up several gigabytes.

In fact, 4K telly can take up close to 10GB per hour.

One way to not run out of storage is to delete content when you’ve watched it – or if you’re not interested in it anymore.

But hitting delete on a Recording doesn’t actually free up the storage in your box.

That’s because it goes into a kind of digital bin that you then need to clear out.

Otherwise the storage isn’t actually freed up to be overwritten by other content.

Thankfully it’s easy enough to find this virtual bin and permanently delete content from your device.

It also has the added benefit of letting you restore content that you (or someone else) mistakenly deleted.

To find this hidden folder filled with deleted content, just go to the Recordings section on your Sky Planner.

Then head to Manage on the side panel, and then choose Deleted.

This is where you’ll find any content that has been deleted but not fully removed from your device.

You can then either delete or restore items inside here.

To free up space, just delete everything and then you’ll be able to save more content to your Sky box.

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SKY TV TRICKS – BONUS TIPS TO TRY

There’s another handy trick for Sky TV customers that helps you to find your lost remote.

If you’ve dropped it down the back of the sofa, don’t panic.

Just head over to your Sky TV box and push the big Q logo on the front.

Yes, it’s actually a button – and it’ll cause your TV remote to beep for 30 seconds.

That way you can find it if you’ve lost it somewhere nearby.

Just bear in mind that it won’t work if the TV remote is dead, not paired, or out of range.

Another clever trick is using voice-search on your TV remote to skip ads.

Instead of manually fast-forwarding through ads on recorded content, you can just hit the microphone button and say “skip forward three minutes”.

HOW TO SEARCH WITH SKY VOICE REMOTE

Here are some easy commands to try out…

Search for specified movie – “[Movie title]”

Search for specified programme – “[Programme title]”

Search for content which stars specified actor – “[Actor name]”

Search for content directed by specified director – “[Director name]”

Search for movies within specified genre – “[Movie genre]”

Search for sport content within specified genre. Genres include football, F1, Rugby Union, Cricket, and Rugby League – “[Sport genre]”

Search specific channel – “[Channel name]”

Search for movies with a specific star rating – “[x] star movies” “movies rated [x] stars”

Search for content with specified picture format. Picture format includes SD, HD, and Ultra HD – “[Picture format]”

Search for sports, teams or competitions – “[Sport Name]”, “[Team Name]”, “[Competition Name]”

This will instantly take you past most ad breaks and let you continue watching in peace.

And if you want to get even more joy out of the voice button, it has a trick for finding movies when you’ve forgotten their titles.

You can just say famous quotes into the TV remote’s microphone to pull up the associated movie or TV show.

Here’s a list of quotes that Sky says will work:

• 42nd Street “Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”
• A Few Good Men “You can’t handle the truth!”
• A League Of Their Own “There’s no crying in baseball!”
• A Streetcar Named Desire “Stella! Hey, Stella!” “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
• Airplane! “Surely you can’t be serious!” “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”
• All About Eve “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
• Animal Crackers “How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
• Annie Hall “La-dee-da, la-dee-da”
• Apocalypse Now “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
• Apollo 13 “Houston, we have a problem.” “Houston, we’ve had a problem” “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
• Auntie Mame “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”
• Avengers: Endgame “I need three gaziliion heroes”, “I need four gazillion heroes”, “I need five gazillion heroes”, “Bring me Mjölnir”
• Beyond The Forest “What a dump.”
• Bonnie And Clyde “We rob banks.”
• Bumblebee “Show me four broken toys”
• Casablanca “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” “Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By.” “Round up the usual suspects.” “We’ll always have Paris.” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
• Chinatown “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
• Citizen Kane “Rosebud.”
• Cool Hand Luke “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
• Dead Poets Society “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”
• Die Hard “Yippee-ki-yay”
• Die Hard “Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho!”
• Dirty Dancing “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
• Dirty Harry “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
• Dog Day Afternoon “Attica! Attica!”
• Dr. Strangelove “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
• Dracula “Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.”
• E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial “E.T. phone home.”
• Field Of Dreams “If you build it, he will come.” “If you build it, they
• Frankenstein “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
• Funny Girl “Hello, gorgeous.”
• Game of Thrones “winter is coming”
• Gone With The Wind “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
• Grand Hotel “I want to be alone.”
• Incredibles 2 “we need elastigirl”, “you have powers”
• Jaws “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
• Jerry Maguire “Show me the money!” “You had me at hello.”
• Jingle all the way “Jingle all the way”
• Knute Rockne All American “Tell ’em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.”
• Lampoon’S Animal House “Toga! Toga!” “Bluto.”
• Little Caesa “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
• Love Actually “show me christmas favourites”
• Love Story “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
• Marathon Man “Is it safe?”
• Mary Poppins Returns “We need the world’s most famous nanny”
• Mary, Queen of Scots “Two quarrelling queens”
• Mean Girls “on Wednesday we wear pink”
• Midnight Cowboy “I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” “Ratso.”
• Mommie Dearest “No wire hangers, ever!”
• Moonstruck “Snap out of it!”
• Muppet Christmas Carol “Bah Humbug!”
• Network “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
• Now, Voyager “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
• On The Waterfront “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”
• Poltergeist “They’re here!”
• Psycho “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
• Rocky “Yo, Adrian!”
• Scarface “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend!”
• Shane “Shane. Shane. Come back!”
• She Done Him Wrong “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime.”
• Some Like It Hot “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
• Sons Of The Desert “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”
• Soylent Green “Soylent Green is people!”
• Star Wars “May the Force be with you.”
• Sudden Impact “Go ahead, make my day.”
• Sunset Boulevard “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.” “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.” “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
• Taxi Driver “You talking to me?”
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day “Hasta la vista, baby.”
• The Godfather II “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
• The Graduate “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”
• The Grinch “You’re a mean one, Mr Grinch”
• The Grinch “Take me to Whoville!”
• The Jazz Singer “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
• The Lego Movie 2 “Two worlds colliding”, “Three duplo aliens!”, “Three lego aliens!”
• The Lord Of The Rings: Two Towers “My precious.”
• The Maltese Falcon “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
• The Pride Of The Yankees “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
• The Sixth Sense “I see dead people.”
• The Terminator “I’ll be back.”
• The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre “Gold hat.”
• The Wizard Of Oz “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”
• Titanic “I’m the king of the world!”
• Top Gun “I feel the need – the need for speed!” “Goose.”
• Wall Street “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
• When Harry Met Sally “I’ll have what she’s having.”
• White Heat “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” “Cody.”
• Yankee Doodle Dandy “My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you.”

Just note that it won’t work if the movie in question isn’t currently available on Sky TV.

CAN’T GET VOICE CONTROL TO WORK?

Here are Sky’s official tips for fixing Voice Control…

If Voice Control isn’t working, check your Sky Q remote for problems:

1. Remove the battery cover off the body of the Sky Q remote.
2. Take out the batteries and insert them again, matching the + and – signs.
3. Once the batteries are in place, replace the cover by aligning the catch with the remote body and sliding forward, so it clicks back into place.

Press help (?) on your remote to check it has battery power:

• If the LED light at the top of the remote flashes , then press and hold the Voice Control button. If you don’t see the search screen then replace the batteries, and press the Voice Control button once more.
• If the LED light at the top of the remote doesn’t flash , then check the batteries are in correctly. If they are, replace them with new batteries. Press and hold the Voice Control button, if you don’t see the search screen then pair the remote.