Migrating settings and programming to new tablo 4th-gen

I currently have a 4th-gen 2-tuner Tablo, and want to transfer my settings and programming to a new 4-tuner model. All of the recordings that I care about are on external storage, and, in any case, I don’t care if I have to lose them. What I care about is the several dozen recording schedules and probably most of the stuff in Settings. I don’t see any way to save/restore any of that short of writing everything down by hand and re-entering it on the new device. Is there any way to do a backup/restore of settings and programming?

I know that these are basically Linux boxes, so I was thinking that if there’s nothing in the existing device software, maybe there’s a way to access the Linux and do things from the “inside”. In any case, a migration feature might be nice to have.

Any idea?

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to do what you describe short of hacking the box (and my Linux skills are not that good). I think you would just need to take notes, and reprogram it. I had to do that with all my shows when I dumped DirecTV and switched to Tablo. You cannot move the external drive to the new device and save the recorded shows. It will prompt you to reformat when you plug it in to the new device.

That being said, you CAN run more than one Tablo on the same network. Just leave the 2-tuner in place and hook up the new one. In the Tablo apps settings, you can switch between the two devices and watch the shows on the 2-tuner device. Once you go through that library, you could use the 4-tuner exclusively… or leave the 2-tuner in place and now you have six tuners. Keep in mind, you will only see the library contents of one device at a time, but it is easy to switch between the two. I think you can even have it so one TV is looking at Tablo A, and another TV is looking at Tablo B. Perhaps a good way to keep your kids shows from cluttering up your library.

Thanks, I’m current running the two 4th-gen Tablos on the same network and can switch between them to manually transfer settings and programming. It’s just time-consuming and error-prone.

My only problem is antenna-sharing, because I also have a Legacy Tablo and am sharing the antenna with that. We’re not in a very good location for broadcast TV (in a canyon with no line-of-sight to anything), so I’ve already split the antenna signal two ways and have an LNA before the splitter. All works acceptably, but changing the splitter to a three-output causes the tuners on the two 7db outputs to have tuning problems. It’s ok for the transfer operation, but not an acceptable permanent solution. At some point, I’ll factory-reset and eBay the 2-tuner 4th-gen unit, but I’m keeping the Legacy for now, since it does nice things that the 4th-gen boxes don’t (mainly remote access, which will one day be available on the 4th-gen boxes, we’re told and I hope).

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