We just upgraded all our Macs before Christmas and sold our older MacBooks on Craigslist. I kept my old iMac specifically to use as a Plex server, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Due to inflation, I need a bit more motivation than just two cents.
The Tablo is just too easy to use and I’m just too lazy to configure a Plex server. I’ll get around to it when I get tired of hearing my wife nag me for not selling the iMac.
You can easily migrate your current HDD from an old Tablo to a new Tablo. That is officially supported.
Unfortunately the transfer to a larger HDD is not. As well, most new Tablo devices have only 1 USB port so I doubt this will ever be a feature. But I could be entirely wrong, I am only speculating based on the hardware in the new Tablo units.
It’s ok. It’s really meant for folks that already have digital media. But still, it is my two cents. I think once you’ve gone to a media player, you really wish you had done it sooner. Because you’re likely even more budget conscience than myself, you probably don’t use any streaming services as well. But if that ever becomes interesting, Plex is great way to get your media anywhere so you don’t have to pay for other expensive streaming services.
Tivo has the ability to copy schedules from one device to another via their web interface. I found it very handy several times as I upgraded to different boxes, or a box suddenly died.
Although they may not have actual stats, tablo is marketed as a consumer product to the general public with little to minimal technical knowledge. Most likely an extremely accurate educated guess “very few users upgrade their HDD”.
Inversely, how do you know customers are leaving their tablos because they bought too small drive in the beginning and can’t easily upgrade to a larger one?
Many of users have found it fairly easy, wrote step by step posts for others. Difficulty level is subjective there are those who’ve multiple times changed. Depends how important it is.
Sadly, this don’t officially include internal drives 
If you replace your Tablo DVR the process below will allow you to migrate your existing recordings stored on an external disk (devices using internal storage, SATA storage or Cloud storage are not supported) and schedule data to your new unit.
I’m not sure you’ll find external storage which is not SATA, so that’s a bit flubbed up.
After what happened in 2020, anything could happen! At one time, tablo said the thing holding them back was a requirement needed root access:
but back-uptablo.sh could assist
more than 
0.02 – they go virtually anywhere, as in one piece. Tablo is pseudo-propritary, it/when something happens to it… if you have your video library archived you’re pretty much SOL. Exported videos can be backed up. (though there is a backup script for tablo) If the drives does fail there are tools to possibly recover data.
I am planning to upgrade my old Tablo Quad to one of the new units that support internal HDD.
In addition, I plan to use a fresh new HDD in the new Quad.
Is there any way to get the schedule - NOT RECORDINGS - from the old HDD to the new HDD and will the old schedule work on a new model Tablo?
If not, it would be cool if you copied the Tivo model of a web based interface of saving and restoring the schedule data.
It has been two years since I started this and hope some feature progress or process has been implemented.
Schedule and guide data is not stored on the drives/HDD. “Old” units were 4-tunsers while all Tablo Quads have always supported internal drives. – “Nope. Same # of tuners. Just a newer ‘fancier’ name.”
You might try moving your drive to new tablo - Moving your recordings to a new Tablo – Tablo. It first backs-up the internal DB to the drive. When a factory fresh tablo finds it on the drive it restores it.
Of course it’ll also restore all the references to the current recordings on the disk. If you don’t plan to copy the files to the new internal drive, it’ll be annoying until overnight maintenance mode supposedly cleans things up.
Note, this process if for external drives. I’m suggesting you may use the process partially to transfer your “guide data” …tablo settings, schedule and stuff.
It’ll just have a reference to the recordings, obviously these aren’t on the new internal drive, so you can’t play them. Unless, maybe you delete them first (so they wouldn’t show up), but if you plan to keep your old one in service until you watch them… well that’s not going to work.
Again, this isn’t a supported process, but it’s possible it’ll get you where you want to be.
I’d like to see them surpass Tivo and come up with a way better Tablo model 
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