I’m upgrading from a 2 tuner to a 4 tuner Tablo. I haven’t
received the 4 turner device yet, but I have a couple of questions:
1.Can I set up the 4 tuner w/o the hard
drive attached and just connect the hard drive from the 2 tuner to the 4 and
the existing recording will carry over? Seems to easy, but I figured I ask. If
not, is there a way to prep the 4 tuner to accept the 2 tuner drive with
recording on the drive w/o losing the shows? 2.I’ve paid for the lifetime subscription on my current 2 tuner, and my
understanding is any additional Tablo’s introduce to my local network
will also have the lifetime subscription service. When I replace the 2
tuner Tablo and delete it from my account, is there anything I need to
do to register my new 4 tuner Tablo? Or, does the lifetime registration
apply to the Tablo account credentials that I created when I originally
purchased the lifetime subscription?
Unfortunately, there is no way a new Tablo will see any of the shows that another Tablo has recorded. If you do plan on using the same hard drive, you should format it on a PC beforehand, otherwise you won’t be able to use the space that already has data. I had to replace my first Tablo because it went bad, and I lost all my recordings (though I didn’t have much at the time).
Lifetime does apply to your lifetime, so any new or additional Tablos are covered as well. Just go to https://account.tablotv.com/login/, login, and you will see your old Tablo as well as a button for “Add Tablo”. You can add your new one there.
That’s one of the few things that really bothers me about this setup - electronic devices DO fail. It’s not all that uncommon in reality. These are well made and I’m sure a lot of great engineering has done into them, but they can fail like anything else. If you have even just weeks of recordings on the thing and it goes south, it’s lost, all gone, you are done and have nothing to show for it. At least with our prior method - the DVDs, there were files on the DVDs I could get burned to other disks and still have our shows, or since I told the recorder to finish and close the disk, they’d likely play on any other DVD player, even a PC if necessary.
I’d really like to see Tablo work on a DR app and perhaps skip the nice fun shiny stuff. Those of us who will use this to record through the heavy TV months so we can catch up on things during re-run season risk losing everything should the Tablo device go south - few other devices leave you hanging like that, at risk of losing it all.
I can’t see it being THAT hard to create an app that would run on a PC - you pull the drive from Tablo, plug it into a PC, and you can recover all that’s been recorded, or, a app that you run one time from a PC against a new Tablo that lets it find and recover recordings made with a prior device.
By the way, if you work in IT you know DR is disaster recovery and any serious computer person takes DR seriously, it’s their priority! (unless they love starting everything from scratch, all new installs and losing all of their data, maybe years worth of work)
Tablo needs a DR app or method and it needs to be before added features of other sorts, IMO. They leave us hanging in case their device fails. The stuff is all there on the drive - seriously, it’s not like it’s GONE, they just can’t read it is all! Recovery from a bad Tablo should be a piece of cake, IMO. Why should you lose your stuff because their device fails? VHS didn’t do that. DVD recorders didn’t do that. If my Toshiba DVD recorder blows, I still have hundreds of disks I can use elsewhere.
Just echoing @snowcat here! Just use the serial number on the bottom of the 4-Tuner and add it to your account on the https://account.tablotv.com/ portal.
As always, thank you for the feedback! If you haven’t noticed, we take user feedback seriously, and we try not to leave too many stones unturned when we think about the future. Stay tuned
