DVR recordings disappeared

all of you, please check your recordings as reported in the xfinity TV remote app. do the recordings show up there?

This has been happening to me for years. All my recorded movies, old boxing matches from espn etc... just disappears. I am from Philly and when the Eagles won the Super Bowl I recorded the game and all of the post games stuff and that is all long gone. I think after a certain amount of time they just disappear. What can you do? I don't know anything about this tv remove app. I go under saved and then recordings. If there is another way to find old recordings please let me know. I've probably had more than 50 recordings vanish over the last year or so

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@Rustyben wrote:

all of you, please check your recordings as reported in the xfinity TV remote app. do the recordings show up there?

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I don't use a cellphone, so I can't comment on the Xfinity TV remote app; however, I did check out the X1 Cloud DVR on the Xfinity Stream portal (via my laptop), and I actually have less recordings on there then I do when I use the cable boxes! The recordings which are missing on the portal work fine on my TV; they work on both the main box and the secondary boxes.

Additionally, I was on the phone with Comcast for hours last Monday: I spoke to several people and was put on hold several times for long periods of time; no issues were resolved, and no explanations were given. The issue was clearly beyond what the representatives with whom I was speaking could effectively handle. I was told other customers were having my problem, that they did not know what was causing it, and that someone from Comcast would call me within 48 hours. It is now Wednesday of the following week, and nobody from Comcast has gotten back to me.

Abysmal cable service, abysmal customer service. Comcast ought to be publically addressing this DVR problem, as it is totally unacceptable. I for one will not let this issue rest.

The cloud copy stores the last 60 hours recorded and things less than 6 months old.  Your physical DVR 'should' store things forever until you delete them but if you swap the box or anything goes wrong with the hard drive - and things do go wrong with hard drives - you will lose things out of the range of things stored in the cloud.  Just guessing, I suspect the DVR tries to recover from errors and keeps working even if some recordings are lost.  I'd swap the box if you haven't done that already.

Personally I've never been too concerned about the limits on the cloud backup because I know if I get that far behind in watching something I will never catch up, but that probably doesn't apply to everyone.

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@lesmikesell wrote:

The cloud copy stores the last 60 hours recorded and things less than 6 months old.  Your physical DVR 'should' store things forever until you delete them but if you swap the box or anything goes wrong with the hard drive - and things do go wrong with hard drives - you will lose things out of the range of things stored in the cloud.  Just guessing, I suspect the DVR tries to recover from errors and keeps working even if some recordings are lost.  I'd swap the box if you haven't done that already.

 

That will explain the discrepancy between the two, then. Good to know.

However, the sudden vanishing of the vast majority of my recordings has yet to be explained, and that is my main, and really only, concern.

Comcast has not yet suggested that I swap the box, and I am sceptical that the problem stems from my individual box. I'm encountering no other issues, and I was told that others had been calling about the same problem. Some of the shows that vanished were recent, some were from earlier this year, and some were quite old; some of the shows that did not vanish were recent, some were from earlier this year, and some were quite old. Whatever happened, it seemed to have followed an indiscriminate procedure, somewhat like a DVR version of the Leftovers: it happened all at once. I've continued to record over the past week, and I've experienced no additional problems. The two channels worst hit were PBS and TCM, but I didn't lose all of my recordings from them (just most). 

One of the representatives I was speaking with could not find any records on their end of a series I had recorded which had vanished; it vanished from even the records she could access!

This is happening to us as well. Physical DVR is deleting saved shows. Would like to send a PM to @CCKenF  or someone else with comcast to take a look at our account. Thanks!

Is there any chance someone is sitting on the remote's 'd' key accidentally? It doesn't have to be pointed at the box to work.  Or maybe the key is stuck.   There are some posts here about remotes sending the down arrow button or something that triggers showing the timeline on the screen all the time until they replace them or replace the batteries.

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@lesmikesell wrote:

Is there any chance someone is sitting on the remote's 'd' key accidentally? It doesn't have to be pointed at the box to work.  Or maybe the key is stuck.   There are some posts here about remotes sending the down arrow button or something that triggers showing the timeline on the screen all the time until they replace them or replace the batteries.

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For me (and I reckon for everyone else here too), definitely NO. As I said, the vanished recordings didn't even show up in the recently deleted folder; when I checked it, only the recordings I purposely deleted were in there. Hypothetically, even if I were to delete dozens of random recordings whilst in a state of sleepwalking, shouldn't I expect to find some traces of them in my recently deleted folder the following day? Especially since recordings I had deleted before the sudden vanishing of recordings were still in there?

And my batteries are fine.

Btw: Two weeks later and I still haven't heard back from Comcast. Not even a 'we are still trying to figure it out' update. Comcast needs to address this problem; there is a significant problem on their end, and the higher ups have apparently made a decision to keep us, the paying customers, in the dark.

My recordings are deleted after one month. My recordingbox is about 20% full. During the last month I've had six phone conversations for a total of about 5 hours on the phone, one two hour home visit, and another hour home visit yesterday. He thought it was fixed but today recordings from one month ago were deleted. If it is a known problem why don't all the techs know about it? What can I do?

Yes I have checked the recover a recording option and just checked it now. The recordings that I deleted are there. But the recordings that comcast deleted automatically after one month are not there nor are they in the on line streaming program. Thank you for your suggestion.

This happened to me as well. DVR under 30% full, and then 20-30 recordings disappeared overnight. Anything older than 1 month was gone.

@Rustyben the devices says 'All Devices'. However, when I select the name that I've assigned the new box, I see less recordings. It's clear to me now that these are local recordings and when I've selected 'All Devices' I'm viewing both cloud and local recordings. So what I'm understanding based on review of other posts is that anything which was local on the old box is unrecoverable. Since I have no way to verify that the content was local vs. cloud; I'm basically out of luck.

So the real question is how do I tell a recording to go to the cloud vs. my local storage? Obviously going forward I'd like to be able to determine a target while setting things up for long tail recordings that I want to save.

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@michael_smith1 wrote:

@Rustyben the devices says 'All Devices'. However, when I select the name that I've assigned the new box, I see less recordings. It's clear to me now that these are local recordings and when I've selected 'All Devices' I'm viewing both cloud and local recordings. So what I'm understanding based on review of other posts is that anything which was local on the old box is unrecoverable. Since I have no way to verify that the content was local vs. cloud; I'm basically out of luck.

 

So the real question is how do I tell a recording to go to the cloud vs. my local storage? Obviously going forward I'd like to be able to determine a target while setting things up for long tail recordings that I want to save.

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your assumption is incorrect (personal experience).  the xfinity tv remote app (iOS) has a DVR manager tab and shows all recordings that are supposed to be actually on your home DVR(s). to see only cloud go to the xfinity Stream TV app and view saved/recordings. the selection of a particular device is apparently not fully functional yet but the 'reason'/function seems worthwhile when they get it running. 

to know if a recording is 'local' or cloud only go to your DVR (not a mini-STB) and play the recording. when the screen progress bar etc. fade away press OK button. lower left corner will be letters DVR for local DVR and a 'cloud icon' DVR for cloud recording being streamed by the set top box. 

No,  then you definitely will not get them back. That was something they did not inform me of until AFTER they switched out my DVR box. However, you probably won't get them back anyway, because nobody seems to know what is happening or why or how to fix it.