Tablo Q&A – Can I Move My Hard Drive From One Tablo to Another?

The answer is yes but, unfortunately, you will lose all your recordings on it.

When a hard drive is plugged into a Tablo DVR, it will trigger a format of said drive. This clears out everything. We do this in order to guarantee that the drive is problem-free and set solely to record your videos. This will even happen if the drive is from another Tablo.

There is one exception, however. If you’ve been using your 4th Generation Tablo’s internal storage and plug in a new external hard drive, your old recordings on the Tablo itself will remain available.

We see every Tablo DVR as a long-term investment, so you should rarely need to start over with a new one. In this regard, we believe choosing an 8 TB USB hard drive is the wisest course of action when adding storage.

Here are some tips for managing your recorded videos:

•  Keep Auto-Delete Recordings On: This Settings feature will delete your oldest recordings to make room for new ones. Keeping this on ensures you’ll never run out of space.

•  Protect Recordings You Want To Keep: In a recorded video’s airing details, you’ll see an option to protect it. Selecting this will mark said recording not to be auto-deleted. So, even if it’s really old, it will stay safely on your drive. This is prefect for treasured movies, games and specials.

• When Recording a Series, Choose How Many Episodes To Keep: When you record a series, you can set it to keep 1 to 20 of its latest episodes. In this way, you can always be sure that auto-delete will not prevent you from binging a show you’ve left to blossom so as to harvest later.

• Never Hard Reset: We won’t tell you how to hard reset here. Simply don’t, until you talk to our technical support team. Hard resetting a Tablo deletes all of its recordings. Don’t do it.

And that wraps up this answer to this week’s question.

We hope you found it handy.