I don’t remember anything automatically formatting a drive. All four times I had to manually do that in the settings menu. This is a very confusing situation and hopefully Tablo can help the user backtrack through all the steps one by one and see what might have happened. Maybe a look at the user’s logs will tell them what we’re all curious about! I hope that c141medic continues to update us on this.
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I have 2 Tablo 4th gens now and each time I added an external drive I was asked to format the USB drive even though they were already formatted.
If there’s supposed to be a popup, I guess I’d never seen it since I was already in the settings, waiting to do it myself.
I was wondering how it would handle the one that was already preformatted as NTFS. It needed formatting as well, and I was glad I didn’t have to format it as something else only to have the Tablo reformat it back to NTFS!
Holy cow, the user wasn’t suppose to be using that configuration. The only thing support should do is see if there are and recordings on the internal flash to recover. Support needs to spend their time working on non-self inflicted customer problems.
I got the message to format as soon as I plugged in the usb drive.
I should’ve stated that as soon as I plugged in the usb drive I received a message to format it. So, the Tablo didn’t format without prompts. That’s why I know it recognized the drive.
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Pretty self righteous of you to determine who should get support for a product and who shouldn’t.
I still recommend contacting @TabloSupport if you want to see if they can figure out what happened to your missing recordings. If there are deeper issues at play, they can help you go from there. But I would reach out before doing anything more severe. They may not be able to get your files back, but any information that your device can provide will help others in the future.
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Support should recover your files if they can. But why should they divert resources trying to figure out what happened to an unsupported configuration.
If I was a customer fighting through problems and discovered they were working on this I would dump the product.
Thanks. I plan on contacting them again today since they never returned my call yesterday. I do t understand why any of my files would’ve been deleted on the Tablo 128gb internal storage. I did read that when you plug in an external drive, the files on the Tablo are transferred to the external drive. Perhaps something happened with the move and the files became corrupted? I think that’s more plausible because SOME recordings transferred to the USB drive but the majority didn’t. I think the either/or function of using an external drive is not helpful. In other words, an external drive should complement/add to the internal storage of the unit rather than replace it. I’ll add to this thread if I find out anything different from tech support.
I’m not sure where people are getting this idea that files are “copied over” to the external drive. I’d never seen this happen, and I don’t understand why they would. It would be extra wear and tear on the internal, and to free up the internal for what?
Any recordings are still accessible (well, should be, we don’t know what happened in your case!) and there would be no reason to fill up your new drive with old recordings.
Sadly, I do wish that one recording had copied over, since it’s the only episode I’m still missing in an entire 4 season series! (I have copied over and merged recordings from the external drive to save on my server. This is the last thing you need to worry about until you figure out what went wrong with your last external attempt!)
I agree that the way the Tablo handles drives is a bit strange, but I’ve come to see it as a better option to asking you to decide where to put each recording. I would like to see the “ignored” internal drive become more useful (as in, timeshift for live TV), but I seem to be one of very few that feel that way.
Do you have access to a linux machine? You would be able to find out what recordings are on the flash drive, even if the directory and file structure is a nightmare. (They’re segmented and untitled.)
Good luck, keep us posted.
I just spoke with Tablo support and they’re totally useless. Apparently, and this is coming from tech support, you do risk a chance of losing recordings that are currently stored on the internal storage of the Tablo if you connect an external drive regardless of what you connect. So, I asked tech support why isn’t that in the FAQ’s when adding external storage and he didn’t have an answer for me. I guess the only way to 100% prevent deletion of recordings is to have an empty Tablo, then plug in the external drive. I also started experiencing “video not available” on a few recorded shows on my Tablo internal storage. So, I can see the thumbnail of the show but when I attempt to view it it indicates “video not available” And none of these recordings show up as “failed recordings.” He did not have an answer for this and said that if it continues to occur, they’ll look into it further. Great.
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