Preserving deleted local episodes in statistics

I really like Antennapod. It’s by far the best podcast app I have found. It only has a few issues imo, one of which is this:

Among other RSS podcasts, I also use a local folder podcast. I usually put batches of 50-ish episodes on my sdcard from my PC at a time, and when I listen to all of them, I delete them (or most of them), and put in the new batch.

This, however, causes my statistics for that podcast to drop rapidly, which is undesireable (i really like statistics/tracking stuff - I also use last.fm for music, etc).

Is there something I can do about this?

This may have already been discussed, but I couldn’t find the relevant topic here, and it is still an issue I’m experiencing.

I have found some GitHub issues about similar topics, but 1) they were all locked 2) they didn’t offer any solutions for local podcasts, only for RSS ones (archiving instead of deleting).

Alternatives considered: keep all played episodes on sdcard, since it probably has enough storage for a while anyway. This works but long-term is unsustainable as I also have other stuff on my sdcard like music, pictures etc. and it will eventually fill up.