Short version:
I think whoever previously owned my refurbished Tablo can still access it, including scheduling recordings, and I want to lock them out. Is that possible without losing content I’ve recorded?
Long version:
I bought my 4 tuner Tablo from Fry’s Electronics a couple months ago. I had been considering purchasing one for a while and finally decided to cut the cord, so I wanted to get started right away. When I got to the Fry’s store, which online indicated they had some in stock, I found that they only had refurbished units on the shelf. The discount was only a couple bucks (~1%), which I wasn’t too happy about, but I was able to open the box and make sure everything looked reasonably good, so I felt comfortable purchasing it anyway.
When I got it home and hooked it up I was surprised that it listed some content in the Recordings screen, but chalked that up to it being a refurb and just deleted the entries and moved on. I found that the 30-day free trial had expired, again due to it being a refurb, but I contacted support and they fixed me up with a free trial in a jiffy. I also had some initial problems finding a HDD that was reliable since the list of models I found on this forum were a bit dated and many were no longer available since the manufacturers have since updated their product lines. I was able to purchase one of the known-good models via Amazon from a place that still had some of the old models in stock, so that problem was quickly solved.
I was happy as a clam for a while, adding more and more selections to record and viewing shows that I had previously chosen to record without issue. But I started noticing that there were items in the Recordings screen that I didn’t remember selecting. I had gone a bit hog-wild queuing up items to record, so I wasn’t positive at first, but after a while I was sure that there were things getting recorded that I didn’t pick - shows that I really don’t like and no one else in my household is interested in. So all I can figure is that whoever returned this unit is still able to access it and set it up to record shows they want.
I don’t want to turn off remote access and I don’t want to do a factory reset at this point since I have plenty of content recorded that I’d rather not lose. I’m not even sure a factory reset will solve anything. Is the unique ID that is used for remote access simply based on the MAC Address of the unit, or is a new one created whenever you factory reset the device?
Is there a way to lock out the previous owner of this device without losing all the content I currently have on my HDD?
I was able to clone the unreliable HDD to the known-good HDD using Linux and all the content was retained, but that was without doing a factory reset on the Tablo. From what I’ve read about doing a factory reset, it will eventually wipe out any content left on the HDD after it is reconnected to the Tablo. Am I mistaken? Is there a process to retain previous recordings on the HDD after the Tablo has been factory reset?
I guess I can use one of the content extraction apps to offload whatever I want to keep, then do the factory reset. But if I go through that much trouble I’d like to be sure it will solve the problem, so it depends on the answer to the unique ID question above.
Suggestions / advice?
Thanks in advance for your help.