Our sky box decided to stop working, a disk error.
We followed the steps to see if it would magically recover, but no luck.
All our recordings are lost, as are our Favourite Channels, and our
recording schedule (including auto links to new seasons of previously
recorded programmes).
The solution was to order a new box from Sky. To their credit, it arrived the next day and the courier collected the old one at the same time.
Fortunately, while googling for the problem, I saw reminders to remove our viewing card before returning the old box. I couldn't get it out. I tried pushing it in to get it to release, it was stuck solid. DH tried gently moving it out with a pair of pliers. Nope. He then used the pliers to push it in a bit, and that did the trick.
The loss included some very old programmes (no longer available anywhere), and also the remainder of 7 seasons of a US show we were working our way through. We had just started season 5, and this is no longer available to download. We can buy access to it from Amazon, or we can sign up to Disney+, or we can wait until the series comes around again on TV. We'll probably take the last option, as we don't want to throw any more money at watching TV.
Luckily, in the last couple of weeks we had reached the final episodes of the current seasons of 4 of the series that we watch, so we didn't have to find those.
After the new box was connected, I set up and organised the favourites, which wasn't difficult (we could still see them before we disconnected the box, so I took photos). On the plus side, I've organised them a bit better this time round (especially the +1 channels).
We then spent a painful hour or so trying to reconstruct other bits of the recording schedule. We don't watch anything live, we always record and watch later so we can speed through the adverts. We are so used to relying on the recordings that we didn't know what channel different programmes were on!
Still, it's only TV.
