DVR Recordings Disappear
Recordings keep disappearing from my DVR. They were not watched or deleted, are less than 1 year old, and the DVR is only 75% full. I’m forced to monitor this daily. A recording made 7/14/24 was s...
Forum Discussion
That's been an outstanding issue for a long time. I suspect some cable boxes Cox has been using may not have the required specs to properly multitask all of Contour's functions. Were you watching TV and/or recording when the daily update occurred? What brand/model box do you have? Some of the cable boxes used by others reporting this issue a few months ago weren't included on the list of Cox Digital Receivers.
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.
Do Contour updates cause a reboot? If not, try setting a reminder in your calendar to perform a manual reboot once a week. If programs are being deleted because of a memory issue, a scheduled reboot might prevent it.
Error
I guess I'm supposed to interpret that terse response. My guess is the box goes into standby mode during the daily update process or when idle for an extended period. So, it's not a reboot. Theoretically then, a box could go for weeks without being rebooted. If it doesn't manage memory well, problems could begin to occur (such as loss of recorded programming) during Contour tasks that require larger amounts of memory or when multiple tasks are performed at the same time, e.g. watching a recorded program while scheduling a recording or performing a search.
Edit: StephanieS's post originally read: snoozed for engagement -steff
I faxed the following to Cox and they have scheduled a visit. Sorry it's so long but I felt the details & background were important. I tried sending this to you a few hours ago but received a rejection notice that I had exceeded the limit on postings. You still may get the other one(s). With Cox it seems like it usually turns into a SNAFU.
The following provides more detail than my comments on the TV Forum and includes problems with the daily update which may be part of the problem.
Cox Recordings Disappear
Recordings keep disappearing from my DVR. They were not watched or deleted, are less than 1 year old, and the DVR is only 75% full. I’m forced to monitor this daily. A recording made 7/14/24 was still listed on the evening of 8/19/24 but was gone on the morning of 8/20/24. Another recording made on 8/4/24 disappeared on 8/6/24. There are 2 others I know of that were recorded on or after 4/24/24, and I also discovered that 7 of the 10 episodes of the VietNam War documentary recorded in 2017 have disappeared.
On 8/20/24 at 10:00PM a recording was on the DVR but had disappeared by 5:00AM the next morning. 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.
This confirms that a recording may be deleted during one update, but it doesn’t do it on all updates. 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, but that has not happened. The deleted recordings had all been originally recorded on different days.
Daily Update Problems
Starting at the end of May, the daily update causes the DVR to keep rebooting every 7 minutes until it gets a good signal, taking anywhere from 1 hour to 7 hours. When it reboots itself there is brief audio static and the screen shows the old snow pattern that would display when channels went of the air after midnight (in the last millenium) then the Welcome.Bienvenido.Bienvenue message appears.
The daily update was scheduled to run overnight, thus the rebooting would be in process when I got up in the morning. I’ve changed the schedule to 8:00-10:00 AM so I can see the message. I don’t know if it reboots at other times or only after updates. My notes going back to 2022 show 99% of the rebootings were before 9:00AM.
When it’s longer than 1 hour I unplug the DVR, wait 10 seconds, then plug it back in and repeat that periodically. I’ve waited 3 hours or longer without unplugging to see if that works. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. One day last week I waited 4 hours.
Here’s a history of the last visit by a technician:
11/3/2023 12:15AM shortly after going to bed a mini box lost its signal. So did the other 2 in the living room and office. Not sure if I checked the DVR, but if it was rebooting at 12:15AM it would have finished at some point because it was working at 5:00AM when a recording started and was later interrupted at 5:47AM.
Later that morning Cox sent an email that a network issue caused by recent network changes may be affecting my service and they would send a technician at no charge.
The technician came on 11/6/2023. He said the network was upgraded from 4 frequencies to 8 and some older line filters and amplifiers can’t handle the change. He checked the input on the roof and went through the attic. He said all the equipment up there needed to be upgraded but the current installation was improper and changing it could fix one problem but create other ones. He pointed to a 2-way splitter on the input line that went to an amplifier and said whoever installed it must have thought it was an output line.
I had previously labeled all the cables and showed him the line in to the amplifier was from the outside antenna which is a 2-wire antenna cable (one connected to an antenna pointed towards San Diego and the other to an antenna pointed towards Los Angeles). The splitter in reverse served as a consolidator…2 wires in and 1 coax wire out from the splitter/consolidator to the input port on the amplifier. All the outgoing cables from the amplifier are from the antenna, not from Cox. They go to the TVs with digital tuners for over-the-air signals, which are accessed by changing the input from cable box to antenna. None of the Cox cables go through an amplifier.
The incoming Cox cable goes into a 3-way splitter and one output from that goes to the DVR. The others go to mini-boxes which never have problems. The technician didn’t mention whether or not there are filters on the incoming cable or the cable from the splitter to the DVR.
Since everything was currently working we agreed to not change anything until something failed, but he did go through and make sure all the connections were tight.The incoming cable comes from a telephone pole across the street. My house is the only one whose cable is connected to it. My neighbor’s comes from a different pole and he never has problems like mine. My guess is the connection on the pole that feeds my house generates an erratic signal that, after a daily update, causes the DVR to reboot continuously until the signal stabilizes. Sort of like a car with bad plugs that is hard to start, but once the car is running it may misfire at times but otherwise is fine until turned off.
My current Cox subscription has Cox Complete Care which states I will not be charged the labor rate if a problem is determined to be in my home wiring. My suggestion is for Cox to check the telephone pole first. If it’s OK, then replace the 3-way splitter mentioned above, and if there are any filters on the incoming Cox line or the line from the splitter to the DVR, replace them too. I’ll be happy to point out which cables are from Cox.
Hi MasterMyDomain, I'm happy to hear that you have a tech scheduled to come out and troubleshhot the issues you are experiencing, Thank you for being so patient,
Breaking news: Today, 8/22/24, the daily update took almost 6 hours to finish. I checked the recordings before it started and they were all there. The first thing I did after the DVR came back on was check the recordings and they were still there. I tried to watch a recording that started late because of the update but it said it wasn’t available, so I watched the rest of the program live for 45 minutes. At the end I checked and 2 recordings had disappeared.
Thanks for that info. It seems your box reboots often, so scheduling additional reboots to fix a memory problem isn't the fix. The lengthy daily update today was probably due to a signal issue. When it occurs during an update, it could potentially corrupt your box and cause unpredictable results, including a loss of recordings. Fixing the signal issue might also fix the loss of recorded programs. There's also the possibility that your cable box is failing.
