This is a followup to my reply 4 hours ago which mentioned another recording had disappeared. That one was at 5:00 AM today (8/21/24). It was on the DVR at 10:00PM last night (8/20/24). No daily update from Cox was done during that period.
At 7:48AM an update message appeared and I clicked to start it. It finished at 8:54AM and after the update a second recording had disappeared. So deletions can occur during an update but they don't occur on every update. They also get deleted when there is no update. To me that indicates updates don't cause the deletion.
In July & August there were updates almost every day but of 262 recordings made from April through August only 7 were lost. Since most of the recordings were made in sequence (for example, episodes 4 to 12 of an old TV series), if a bad sector on the DVR disk became corrupted you would think several recordings in a sequence would disappear at the same time. That hasn't been the case- - all of the deletions were originally recorded days & weeks apart.
The daily update process is a nightmare but since it isn't what is causing the deletions I'll do a separate post covering the problems I'm having with it.
