Yeh, that's another thing. I have a ton of chopped recording because this abnormality can happen at any time. With this new dump and restart, it's not the Nightly "Restart", it's not updating anything. Normally that's later or behind the scenes. I wonder what the nightly reboot actually is? This new thing does not take as long, just a couple of minutes with no "Start Up" screens or the if you wait the 15-20 minute Guide update. So although the recordings are chopped up, it's a shorter amount of time. Not that I am saying it's OK. It's NOT!!! As it has been said by others and I said it when they announce the next update with all these background "security" and "new IU" fixes and was discounted, "I wonder what they'll break next?". Wulp, they broke somethin'. We were right.
Sounds like you are experiencing something similar to what I've seen. For example, last night my Flopper (AKA Hopper) gave me the onscreen yes or no option to look for important updates. I decided to click on YES and it started the customary shutdown. I have a second TV in the same room that is connected to my Hooey (AKA Joey). But the program on the second TV continued on uninterrupted and I started thinking, "if the Flopper is now shut down for updating, the program on the Hooey should not still be on since the Hooey is sourced from the Flopper."
Thus, it was obvious that there was NO update going on at all with the Flopper. After waiting a while, I hit the SELECT key and turned the Flopper back on.
This happens many nights where the Flopper shuts off and does nothing more than a reboot -- no update is done at all.
There have been other nights when the Flopper actually DID do a regular update. But a half-hour later is asking me AGAIN to shut down to look for important updates. Even after complying with it -- and just seeing it reboot only -- it asked me a THIRD time shortly afterward to do it AGAIN.
I am very seriously thinking of dumping Dish when my 2-year sentence is up in Jan. 2017 because I've grown very weary of these nutty update interruptions at Dish's convenience instead of mine. I love to binge record things and then play them back overnight for dubbing permanent copies to VHS or DVD. But I can't do this on many nights because I'm also sick and tired of setting a half-dozen shows to auto-play -- only to find out that the nightly update shut it all down as my recording machine dutifully continues on recording 4-5 hours of dead air.
I do believe that satellite TV may be running its course. I say this because, in part, of the constantly interrupted signal when a cloud cover goes overhead, if it starts to drizzle outside, etc. I have never had a worse year with Dish than the past 12 months with the signal going out all the time. In previous years with Dish -- with their earlier DVR's (which were MUCH more user friendly) -- losing the signal only happened when a very violent thunderstorm was taking place. Now, all it takes is a little sprinkle and it's like the dish is saying, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up!"
This, combined with the constant rebooting & updating, is making Dish impractical for me to use since I enjoy dubbing off my recordings to permanent media. And since doing this overnight is the best way for me, it just doesn't make sense to stick with Dish beyond the time where there would be no penalty for an early withdraw.
I think I'll look at the hard wired TV services such as Comcast or Uverse. Their DVRs do not come close to matching Dish's 2TB storage capacity (on the Flopper), but having all that storage is useless if the service is not performing up to its standards of previous years.
