# 510 Deleting Old Progams w new software update



## prazuch

Over the last couple days, my 510 has started deleting old programs, even though I had over 30 hours of available space. I didn't realize it was happening until yesterday when I suddenly had 40 hours available, now this morning I find I have 50 hours and a ton of missing saved shows, many of which were protected. I am livid!!

I will try to archive what's left before they're gone too, but this is crazy.

Anyone else having similar problems?


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## FTA Michael

In this thread http://www.dbstalk.com/showpost.php?p=957376&postcount=19, P Smith wrote of the new software update for the 510: "changed internal structures of metadata of recordings to accommodate coming DRM implementation"

DRM = digital rights management = at some point, for some reason, you won't be allowed to play your recordings. Maybe one step is to autodelete anything that's, say, over a year old? I have no idea.


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## prazuch

Spent some time with online DishNetwork chat Friday; once I was able to get bumped up to advanced tech support, the rep submitted a report to their ops folks, and offered to send me a replacement 510 in the meantime. Means I have to dump the content that remains on my current 510 to DVDs, but maybe a new harddrive won't be a bad thing since the old one's been running for about 3 years now. I just hope they get the software problem fixed so the new 510 doesn't start deleting programs, too.

I'll post more if I hear back from the ops department.....


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## Geeke19

heck I cant even delete anything on mine. it goes away but when I hit dvr again it shows up. have like 10 mins left on my hard drive. :nono2:


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## catnap1972

FTA Michael said:


> In this thread http://www.dbstalk.com/showpost.php?p=957376&postcount=19, P Smith wrote of the new software update for the 510: "changed internal structures of metadata of recordings to accommodate coming DRM implementation"
> 
> DRM = digital rights management = at some point, for some reason, you won't be allowed to play your recordings. Maybe one step is to autodelete anything that's, say, over a year old? I have no idea.


That or put some sort of copy protection (macrovision?) across the outputs so that you can't transfer anything to DVD (or VHS, if you're still using it)?


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## dennisb3234

I had only 4 recorded programs and over 56 hours available on the 508 and last night another program was deleted. This is the 4th time in the last several weeks where the oldest program got deleted. This platform has gone from extremely reliable to crap in less than a year. :bang


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## prazuch

I wonder how widespread this problem is. Seems odd that it would affect only a few 510 users. There have to be a LOT of 510s out there, I'm surprised more people aren't weighing in on this.


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## Gremraf

It is my wifes DVR, how would I know if it is deleting stuff


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## pringerx

Well my 510 just deleted a program by itself as well... this happened yesterday. I know for a fact the program was on there the day before and nobody knows my password... otherwise more stuff would be gone. Luckily, said episode is running again next week... :nono2:


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## Frostwolf

Gremraf said:


> It is my wifes DVR, how would I know if it is deleting stuff


the real problem finally, I thought it was just bad firmware:lol:


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## RTCDude

I've never had this problem on my 510. But I always record programs as "protected". Has anyone ever had a protected recording deleted?


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## prazuch

The faulty software is deleting protected and nonprotected shows. My DVR now has had all of its content (60 hours) deleted without my permission, and only keeps recently recorded shows for 24 hours before they're zapped.


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## rustamust

My wifes 510 has not deleted a single program on its own in the three years we have had it. She has never protected any programs. The same 40 some odd hours have been there since before the latest update.


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## shadough

My 510 has 369 also but has NEVER deleted anything yet. I really havent had many problems w/ it. Its been a lil qwirky but then again, I rarely ever use it, since the only programming I have on it is NPS. (I have mostly protected programs w/ only a couple unprotected). roughly 11 hrs of free space?


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## dennisb3234

My 508 has deleted 1 program from the hard drive every night for the last 3 nights. I had only 1 program stored on the drive each night. Last night I protected the program and it still got deleted.

I sent email to DISH but doubt they will respond. I think I'm through with DISH. The primary function of this device (the DVR) is broken and is getting no attention.


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## rthomp03

My 508 lost 20+ programs several weeks ago, and the wife isn't very happy about it. :nono:


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## Mikegerard

I have a 510 with 3.69 and had about 60 hours of shows.

Last week a bunch deleted. I protected the remaining 36 shows. Six hours later there are now only 20 shows left. I am going to call Dish but my guess is they will be all gone before any solution happens. 

I'm going to back up what I can to DVD before it's too late. 

Is it still a DVR if it does not keep the recordings :nono:


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## prazuch

Last week Dish sent me a replacement (refurbished) 510 after I complained about losing 60 hours of recorded shows. While I thought it was a software-only problem causing it, the replacement 510 with the same software version (3.69) has been recording and keeping programs for several days now without incident.

So my advice to anyone having this problem: go ahead and call (or chat online as I did) to get a replacement 510. Of course, you'll want to record to DVD the stuff off your old machine before you send it back (at their expense).

The Dish online rep and the Dish activation operator I talked to both confirmed they were getting numerous calls about the 510 model. I wonder if Dish will ever issue an official statement on what caused this problem to affect some machines and not others......

Last thought: Dish was very helpful replacing the equipment. Just wish the problem never happened to begin with!


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## P Smith

You missed a point of mixing recordings BEFORE P3.69 and AFTER - that the issue.


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## pringerx

^- What?

I would think it makes no difference whether I record a program on 3.68 or 3.69. The recordings should stay on the DVR menu no matter what version I'm on. That's a _basic_ feature of the DVR. :nono:

I hope this is not happening, but if they *are* going to auto-delete programs that are 'x' days old (let's say DRM goes into effect, for instance), it would be nice if the menu showed how many days you have left to view an event before it disappears... sort of like what they do with Dish on Demand, I guess.


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## BillM

I have a replacement 510 which I received about two months ago from Dish, and it seems to be doing this; typically I see recorded programs will happily sit on the disk for weeks at a time, but as soon as I start deleting newer programming, I find the next morning one additional older program that I didn't want deleted had disappeared from the directory. This has all of the feel of a software bug, not a hardware one, so I really don't want to have to send it back.

:-(


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## BobaBird

BillM, what is your receiver's software version? Dish's software page lists P369, P400 and P401 all as being current.


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## colavsfaninnwia

My 508 and 510 have deleted programs automatically. My 508 deletes might be because the programs were extremely old like say over 3 years. My 510 deletes were programs that were on there lets say around 8 months or so...


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## MTcougar

RTCDude said:


> I've never had this problem on my 510. But I always record programs as "protected". Has anyone ever had a protected recording deleted?


Yes!!! After the new software update, any show older than 30 days, including shows marked as "protected" got wiped out. It happened immediately after the upgrade and on an ongoing basis. Aaaaarrrrgh!


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## MTcougar

We just had the most frustrating experience with Dish Network tech support in India. The great thing is that as the support rep had us walk through the steps to reset the receiver by unplugging the unit, the dang thing deleted an episode of The Office while we were actually on the phone! The guy said to call back in 30 minutes if it was still a problem. What?!?!


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## RTCDude

MTcougar said:


> Yes!!! After the new software update, any show older than 30 days, including shows marked as "protected" got wiped out. It happened immediately after the upgrade and on an ongoing basis. Aaaaarrrrgh!


Did the receiver go directly from P369 to P401, or was there P400 in between? Plus,
how is it after all the reseting?


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## jkane

MTcougar said:


> We just had the most frustrating experience with Dish Network tech support in India. The great thing is that as the support rep had us walk through the steps to reset the receiver by unplugging the unit, the dang thing deleted an episode of The Office while we were actually on the phone! The guy said to call back in 30 minutes if it was still a problem. What?!?!


So did you call back 30 mintues later and say the program was still deleted.


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## Pulsar

prazuch said:


> I wonder how widespread this problem is. Seems odd that it would affect only a few 510 users. There have to be a LOT of 510s out there, I'm surprised more people aren't weighing in on this.


Back when I got the P400 version on my 510 (late Sept), I lost 20 hours the first time I used it and another 30 hours a week or so later. Protection had no effect. Some recordings were old and some were new. There seemed to be no pattern to it. Tech support didn't even know about the software versions and told me it was my receiver. How could it be my receiver if the only symptom is deleted recordings? And it happened the first time the day I started using the new software. Too much of a coincidence---it had to be a software problem. I tried to report the bug to tech support, but they don't seem to have good systems for reporting bugs, so who knows what happened to it. I did find that I was upgraded to version 401 3 weeks after I had gotten 400, and before the deployment of 400 was complete. That told me that dish software engineers realized that they had some serious problems with the new software. The new version seemed to work well until the past two days. Yesterday about 10 hours were deleted and today another 35 hours. My most helpful tech support person on the executive tech support email suggested upgrading to a different receiver. This 5xx series has definitely gotten so unreliable that it is pretty much useless as a recording device. Note that one of the dish network email tech support people said that the DVR is not intended for storage! Well, I certainly wouldn't store my wedding video there, but I think I should be able to keep a show around for a couple months.

If people woke up every morning and found 1/3 of their files deleted on their computers, Microsoft would be out of business very quickly. This is the direction E* is headed if they don't solve these problems quickly.

I've already sent a long email to E* exec tech support suggesting that they have a serious software engineering process problem on their hands and making suggestions on things to fix. Errors as serious as this should never have made it into released software. One problem is that the software provides no log that is accessible to the user indicating what it did, when, and why. Without this information, the software engineers will have a very difficult problem finding and fixing the bugs.

If anyone knows a way to get to the logs, that I'm sure must be there, just hidden from the average user, I would like to be able to retrieve them and send them out to the software engineers for use in their troubleshooting.

I can't believe that E* still has not acknowledged this problem on their website. Based on the DBSTalk forums, the problem has been known for months, plenty of time to include it in the troubleshooting issues on the website.

I'm also surprised that none of the E* employees that read this site have provided any information about this bug, how to avoid it, how to work around it, or anything useful about it.


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## BillM

I'm running 401, and still seeing programs get deleted. What I've noticed is that the oldest program in my DVR recordings appears to go away the night after a newer recording is completed, presumably during the 3am guide update. I cannot reliably reproduce this, but I have noticed it 3 times in succession.

I suspect several of us would be willing to help them find this problem if Dish would first admit that a problem exists, and secondly, reach out to us. I don't want credits towards premium programming, I want the confidence to record something on one date, and know that it will be around in the future for me to watch at my leisure.


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## P Smith

They are not interesting in support obsolete PVRs, you must switch to newest models like 622 or 722.


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## BobaBird

Note that the new software introduced a major new feature for these obsolete PVRs, and AFAIK it didn't require a court order to get it. It's very disappointing though that the random deleting problem hasn't been fixed.


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## P Smith

You named it 'random' - well, I don't see it that way from many complains.


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## shadough

Well at long last, my 510 has deleted programs on its own. The last software version I can confirm having was 369.......I now have 401....cant recall if i ever dl'd 400, but right after the 401 update, thats when I noticed that several games I recorded from earlier this year had been deleted. I can't recall if they were protected or not, and I had plenty of drive space. All of my older stuff, some going back to 2004, is still there though. And I've recorded new events and havent had any other issues. But I am disapointed about losing those other programs. I've since started to record off the dvr the few recordings that I did not already have on tape/dvd.


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## kavemankev

I just got off the phone with tech support, and they are sending me my 2nd replacement 510.


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## P Smith

Don't expect the replacement will solve the issue .


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