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Tuesday, November 9th, 2021

Can we undelete recordings once deleted?

Can we undelete once deleted?

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ACE - Expert

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2K Messages

4 years ago

No. 

ACE - New Member

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5.2K Messages

4 years ago

if you erase a file from a hard drive completely, are you able to regain it out of the blue? nope. Same with DIRECTV recordings..

New Member

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2 Messages

4 years ago

Unfortunately, the short answer is no. But contrary to what was implied above, a program on a hard drive (including the hard drive of a DirecTV DVR) is not "erased completely," when you first delete it; it just has its address on the drive erased from the index (usually by deleting the first letter of the file name). That makes the space the file takes up on the drive available to be overwritten. But until the file itself IS overwritten by a new file (which could be the very next time you save/record any other file, or even the next time you reboot the drive), your "erased" file is actually still there intact. The problem is that while there is software that can recover (find and rename) an erased file on your computer hard drive, DirecTV DVRs provide no such utility. So unfortunately, when you "delete" a TV recording from a DirecTV DVR, even though the recording's file is still there until the next time something is written to the DVR's hard drive, there's no way to retrieve it.

ACE - Expert

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2K Messages

4 years ago

But until the file itself IS overwritten by a new file (which could be the very next time you save/record any other file, or even the next time you reboot the drive)

@Jiyu Since a DVR is recording something all the time that deleted file space could be overwritten at anytime, not just for a scheduled recording.

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2 Messages

4 years ago

@sandblaster 

I didn't say anything about a "scheduled recording,," so I'm not sure why you posted your comment. What I said (as you quoted) was: "...until the file itself IS overwritten by a new file (which could be the very next time you save/record any other file, or even the next time you reboot the drive) ..." so you essentially said what I already said myself, that the file could be overwritten at any time.

My point was that no file on any hard drive is "completely erased" as soon as you "delete" it. It remains entirely intact on the hard drive until it is overwritten by a new file being saved in the same space. But again, that doesn't help a DirecTV user anyway, because DirecTV DVRs (unlike personal computers) have no utility for recovering a "deleted" recording. Once you "delete" it, even though it might not be overwritten yet and is actually still there, you have no way to access it again. That's a design flaw in the DirecTV DVR's design, because they could easily have made it possible for you to recover a "deleted" program (provided you do it very soon after deleting it, before it gets overwritten), but they chose not to provide that ability.


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