BlueSky TV - Recordings Vanished

[bdebroni]

Let's start with the setup in my household. We have 2 BlueSky TV boxes, each with a 500 Mb drive, giving us a total of 1 Gb of recording space. We have had this setup for close to 2 years now, and have never experienced any problems except for an occasional recording not being able to play back (bad sectors on a hard drive???).

My wife and I left on a short vacation. When we left, it was showing that we had used around 62% of the available recording space. When we got back 6 days later, I was looking through my recordings and noticed that it was saying that we had only used 50% of the available space. I checked with everyone in the household, and no one had deleted anything. Looking through the recordings, a number of recordings were (seemingly) randomly deleted. Some of the recordings that were deleted were old recordings. However, some that were not deleted were definitely older than some that were. All of the recordings have the default save option of keeping it until space is needed, but we should not have run out of space given the amount of free space that we had and what was scheduled to be recorded. None of the deleted recordings were available under Recently Deleted. Since we have returned, everything appears to be working as expected.

Has anyone else ever had this happen to them? I have some theories as to what may have happened, but I cannot confirm these theories because the BlueSky system does a wonderful job of hiding details from the user. Is there any way for the end user to perform some diagnostics to see any logs that the system may have generated or to see if either hard drive is having problems? I would really like to avoid a repeat of this as we lost some recordings that cannot be obtained via the On Demand system.

[wgh]

Happens to us all the time.  Contacted SHAW and they had no explanation.

[shaw-tony]

Hey bdebroni and wgh,

Thank you for reaching out! If your recordings are older than one year they are automatically removed to ensure you have space for future recordings. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,

Tony | Community Mod.

[bdebroni]

Unfortunately, some of the recordings that vanished were recorded between January and April, so they were in no way older than a year, so something else must have caused those recordings to be deleted.

Brad

PS - That one year expiration just sounds dumb to me. I am quite cognizant of how much space my recordings are taking up, and quite able to decide for myself what I should delete to make up space (if so needed). Also, shouldn't there be a warning that it may delete some recordings out from underneath me when I am in no way close to running out of space? Seems to me that this should be a configurable feature that people in the know can turn off.

[shaw-tony]

bdebroni I am sorry for any frustrations that may have caused. Definitely sounds like a faulty hard drive. If it becomes an ongoing issue, I will recommend contacting our technical support team members to schedule a service technician to swap out the PVR (unfortunately you will lose all your recording at that point).

I appreciate your feedback regarding the one-year expiration and will pass it along to our product team.

[lilloco]

This happened to us last night. We have a single Bluesky main unit with 3 portals. Box was roughly 70% full with a large selection of kids recordings and a lot of recently recorded Say Yes to the Dress - Canada.

Box was fine mid afternoon, all recordings intact. 10:30 last night we sat down to watch some recorded TV and everything was gone except 2 episodes of Fancy Nancy and the most recent Blood & Treasure. The recently deleted showed 0 items.

Went to bed to watch Blood & Treasure, and the box now said "You don't have any recordings yet", still 0 items in the recently deleted.

[shaw-tamara]

Hey lilloco 

We're really sorry to hear that happened! I posted earlier but am editing my response as I found a bit more information on this... It looks like we are investigating the issue as we have had some other reports. Our technical support team is looking for more examples so if you can get in touch with them directly they can get the information from you. You can find our contact information on https://www.shaw.ca/contact-us/

[heidimo]

This happened to me as well. Just got home from 8 days out of town. When I left my PVR was 82% full, when I came back it was only 66% full. I had 3 full seasons of a show I recorded from BBC Canada in there and only 1 season and 1 other random episode are left. Same thing happened with another show, only 3 of the 6 episodes left. Very frustrating! I rebooted the pvr twice but no change. Is there any way to recover the data that was lost?

[bdebroni]

Well, this happened to me again last night. Yesterday afternoon, everything looked good, but when my wife sat down to watch some recorded shows in the evening, guess who had to deal with the fallout?  Now is a great time to deal with the boxes as we have pretty much nothing left that we care about.

I called their support number, and after waiting on the phone for 70-odd minutes, I was finally able to talk to a service representative (out of Winnipeg). As soon as I said that I had Bluesky and was missing recordings, he replied that it was a known issue that was affecting a not insignificant number of people, and that they were working with a 3rd party (my guess is Comcast) to track down what was going on. According to him, the recordings are still on the hard drive, it is just that the box has no way to find the recordings. Also according to him, this has been ungraded from an incident to a problem, and is being tracked internally with a ticket with the ID of PRB0048584. He also said that because it was upgraded to a problem, that a resolution would probably come soon. Personally, what that means to me is that they have acknowledged that it is a problem, but that in no ways means that they know what the problem is or how to fix it. Fingers crossed that it is sooner rather than later!

[nedf]

Twice in the last few weeks my Bluesky has cleared all of the recordings. It is getting frustrating trying to remember what programs I had not watched and looking them up on demand to watch them. I assumed they were lost after an update and reboot?