Sky Box lost all recorded programs

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madcarue

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Topic # 242113 11-Oct-2018 13:25

My Sky Plus box has packed up and when going into planner it says I have no programs in planer but I should be about 75%full the diagnosis now reads HD not responding.

I have a techy coming on Friday to fit a new box I am told this means all programs in planer will be lost, surly they can be transferred from old drive to new or will that just be too inconvenient. This is the third box I have required over the years and each time I have lost all my recorded programs you would think by now they could have sorted this problem.

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Reply # 2106233 11-Oct-2018 13:31

Hard drives only last so long. DVRs are often constantly accessing the drive in order to allow instant rewind functionality. A drive that is being constantly accessed is going to fail eventually.

Dingbatt

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Reply # 2106293 11-Oct-2018 14:44

Since it is your third box you know the drill. Ring up, get a replacement, lose all your recordings. Are you suggesting Sky need to provide some sort of raid configuration of hard drives in their boxes to provide redundancy?
Hopefully some of the programs lost will be available on-demand for you.

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RunningMan

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Reply # 2106321 11-Oct-2018 15:29

Move to a streaming service(s) that doesn't rely on local storage perhaps?

JimmyH

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Reply # 2106332 11-Oct-2018 15:46

The Sky box isn't a reliable way of storing recordings. From memory, they even tell you that in the manual. Plus, it doesn't actually have that much usable storage anyway.

If it's something you want to keep for watching much later rather than watch & delete pretty much immediately, then your best bet is to move recordings off the Sky box and on to a more robust storage platform. Sadly, you can only do it in real-time and it does require the right equipment. But it's pretty easy and the equipment isn't very expensive if you already have a laptop or spare computer. I do it quite a bit (but not as much as I used to), mostly so I can watch material in another room or on my laptop when travelling.

davidcole

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Reply # 2106338 11-Oct-2018 15:52

Sky always said recordings are not to be considered long term. Some uofrades, or hdd failures will win them. And they don’t allow transferring off of recordings, and can’t any way, as recordings are actually stored encrypted.

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rugrat

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Reply # 2106441 11-Oct-2018 18:26

I turn off instant rewind. Don’t know if it makes drive last longer but figured it can’t hurt.

Even if someone has a Freeview recorder, if drive packs up recordings are lost.

Bung

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Reply # 2106517 11-Oct-2018 21:17

AFAIK the Sky recorder has a lot of the drive devoted to movies you might pay to watch and it downloads and stores them just in case.

ockel

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Reply # 2106521 11-Oct-2018 21:34

Bung: AFAIK the Sky recorder has a lot of the drive devoted to movies you might pay to watch and it downloads and stores them just in case.

Half of the drive, isn't it? It used to be on the 1St gen MySky. Wonder if it is still the same proportion on the newer boxes.

JimmyH

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Reply # 2106861 12-Oct-2018 16:47

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davidcole: And they don’t allow transferring off of recordings, and can’t any way, as recordings are actually stored encrypted.

Yes, you absolutely can.

You can do it either in SD (over the analog outputs) or in HD (over the HDMI output).

It has to be done in real time. But the equipment isn't expensive, and setting it up isn't hard either. That's largely how I built my movie collection back in the day, starting with VHS (=bookcase of tapes), then DVD recorder, and latterly network-based solutions. It's not difficult to do.

madcarue

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Reply # 2106882 12-Oct-2018 17:19

I would have thought that some sort of SSD back up could be built into the box.

Handsomedan

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Reply # 2107947 15-Oct-2018 09:24

I've lost lots of series to the cursed failed HDD in a MySky box.

I know it when I record a series...there's a good chance I may never see the end of it if I don't watch it soon.

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madcarue

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Reply # 2107966 15-Oct-2018 09:50

I have stopped recording anything on TV1 that is being streamed and save the stream in "my Favorites"

JimmyH

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Reply # 2108004 15-Oct-2018 10:45

madcarue:

I have stopped recording anything on TV1 that is being streamed and save the stream in "my Favorites"

I don't record anything off Freeview on the Sky box. I have a separate FV recorders for that (Panny Blu Ray & DVD recorder units). Firstly, it's networked so I can watch shows in the room other than the one they were recorded on. Secondly, and more importantly, it avoids tying up space on the Sky decoder's pitifully small hard drive.

It's only 500GB to start with. But my understanding is that Sky reserves about half that space (and one whole tuner) to constantly record PPV product that they think I might want to watch. Given that I have never once used PPV on Sky, I really wish there was a setting to turn this off, to make the extra drive space usable and reclaim the use of the tuner. Plus, I suspect that the wear and tear from all that constant (pointless!) recording is probably a contributing factor in drive failures.

$15/mo to enable use of the hard drive, and then apparently only making circa 250GB of it available, is very annoying. In the era of 2TB drives retailing for circa $100, surely they can do better than this?

Rikkitic

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Reply # 2108022 15-Oct-2018 11:14

I dumped Sky before the new Sky box came out, but I expect there are many ways to get around the limitations built into it just as there always have been. For example, an HDMI recorder and splitter. If you can schedule the box to play to the TV the same way it records (series TV, for example) then you don't lose a thing but you gain a lot of flexibility, reliability, and unlimited capacity, not to mention backup, editing, whatever. There is no need for the Sky recording function at all and you can leave the TV off when not actually watching.

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madcarue

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Reply # 2108159 15-Oct-2018 13:17

I thought the Sky box was 1TB so if they use half of a 500G for themselves the the new box should have 750G.

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