Wished Dish stored Timers and Favorites in the Cloud.

Character Zero

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
318
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My 722 died yesterday (green light on, fan on, green light off, fan off, rinse, repeat) and they are shipping out a new unit. Luckily we were up to date on our recordings for the most part, but the pain is going to be setting up my favorites lists and timers. It would be awesome if Dish could somehow tie those to your account and if you get a new box or upgrade you could just pull those on to the device and not have to set them all up again.
 
You can save them in your remote as a backup and as a way to move them from one 722 to another.
 
Still, the suggestion is a good one. For YEARS I've wondered why Dish doesn't have a save/restore on Dish Remote Access to do just that. Dish's servers obviously have this information, or they couldn't present it to you via web page.
 
Its a good idea, and one I am sure they are working on, they are currently building a huge data center so they can house everything themselves without worrying about services from outside providers.
 
it would be nice if it just had a backup to USB option.

if they are ever nice enough to add dlna, and allow backing up to a remote system, that would be even better!
 
Scott Greczkowski said:
Its a good idea, and one I am sure they are working on, they are currently building a huge data center so they can house everything themselves without worrying about services from outside providers.

It should be an easy thing to do since you can go to DRA or DO and view your timers already. Why not add a back up timers option! If you can set a timer from DRA or DO, then you should be able to restore a list of timers.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys
 
Here's an even simpler idea. Why not add an option in the Menu to back up/restore timers to an ehd.
Well... That's not simpler since there is no data structure on the EHD that could hold the info. It would all have to be built from scratch. But DRA/DO has this info already there! It should be simple, but it seems nothing is simple about DRA or especially DO.
 
Yeah and while manually adding them back in going through the guide is a pain, its the shows that aren't on right now (i.e. Mad Men) that I had in the list and now need to remember when any episode shows back up on AMC that I need to add the timer.
 
Maybe 2 years ago or less, on a Charlie Chat something like that was brought up and I remember Charlie saying they were "considering" it (timers, settings saved in the cloud for retrieval). Somehow, I would bet they actually will have such a feature, probably for the ViP (HD) boxes only that are connected to broadband internet. I would not expect it for the SD boxes.
 
one other point to make... part of Dish Online is serviced by a "cloud" ... and even with that they (dish) royally f'd it up ... for a month straight there were (and still are) times that attempting to get in will slow down to a crawl, that your DVR events wont list making you log out and back in again and hit refresh several times just to get something to show.

When you boil it down .. its just another feature that for what ever reason dish didn't think it through, or thought they'd know more than the average Joe, or that it was too complex for the average joe to have a "Save" "Restore" "Verify" options in that menu.

yes.. my old "dish sucks" with technology mantra ... maybe a lot of that should be laid at Echostar's feet ... but Dish should be vetting this stuff and telling Echostar "Its not good enough" ... kind of like those Toshiba commercials "can ship now if we don't include ..." <executive imagines some horrible scenario without technology X> "NO it must have ...!"
 
Here's an even simpler idea. Why not add an option in the Menu to back up/restore timers to an ehd.
If by "ehd" you mean any USB storage device, i.e. a flash drive, yes, that would be nice. If you mean strictly to an external HDD, way too few people have that option for Dish to put much effort into.
 
Is it really there or does DRA/DO just get it from your receiver?
Yes, the timers start out in your receiver.

When you point your web browser to DRA/DO, everything you see is coming most recently from DRA/DO servers; all the menus, decorations, inline graphics, and control buttons, are all coming from Dish servers and NOT from your receiver directly. (Wish they did!) Now at some point in the past, Dish servers were listening to your receiver call home, and they uploaded the timer information and cached it. Possibly this is done in real time, but I think TG2 discovered that it's coming from cache on DO, and often this cache is seriously out of date.

So, I'm pretty confident that the timer information is indeed really there on DO/DRA.
 
I agree that this would be a good idea. It is easy to setup timers on a replacement receiver for shows that are currently showing in the next 7-10 days. Remembering to set them up for shows that will not be on for a couple of months is the tricky part.
 
Disconnect your receiver from the network and try. I'll bet your timers aren't there anymore.... :)
repeatedly people have deleted items from their receivers and the content is not updated at DO/DRA until after you do a refresh ... this may not have happened to you, but it has happened to others.

And its not just because you are on a static page (refresh), but because DO/DRA polls the data either from the receiver or the receiver sends it out during one of the "update" cycles. either way the data is captured and available to Dish on at least two points (backend 1 & front end the other) of the DO/DRA to/from the user.

the key would be Dish having the ability to export and import the list in some form for the user. Save as XML / Restore from XML. Then the dish server would have to communicate this to the receiver at its next planned update time.

There would also need to be good conflict resolution .. ie.. user X changes timer Y 5 minutes ago on the web site ... then goes to his receiver and changes the same timer Y 3 minutes ago... most recent change wins? and dish would then hopefully explain "Timer Y was not set from DO/DRA because timer y was more recently updated on the receiver ..."

As to cache on the whole ... If they were not using a cache of some sort, then every time you would connect to DO, and on every change of the page, there would be a lag whilst the DO front end waits for the back end collection of data (user account permissions, packages you subscribe to, current content on your drive)

additionally with out the cache of information, the problems that have been seen with User ID's and what dish currently has listed for them should not have existed ... because they would be pulling the data fresh every time you'd log in ... which it doesn't .... hence when the user account gets corrupted they loose some channels on The Guide .. or days of DRA only, would be on their respective dishXX server and wouldn't have needed to be bumped to a different one for functions to suddenly start working again.
 
My 722 died yesterday (green light on, fan on, green light off, fan off, rinse, repeat) and they are shipping out a new unit. Luckily we were up to date on our recordings for the most part, but the pain is going to be setting up my favorites lists and timers. It would be awesome if Dish could somehow tie those to your account and if you get a new box or upgrade you could just pull those on to the device and not have to set them all up again.

That would be a great feature...could have used that when my 625 died on me.
 
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