At first glance, the Altice One DVR Plus service seems like an improvement to Optimum’s previous DVR service. You can play back your recorded shows on any cable box in the home, and you can continue watching a show where you left off on a different TV. The new cable box also gives you the ability to record up to fifteen programs at the same time.

The user interface has also been improved. Recorded shows can be organized by show rather than just by date. You can record single shows or schedule to record the first run of each new episode of your favorite show. We always recommend setting the recordings to record at least 2 additional minutes of your show, since recording the exact allotted hour often results in missing the last few moments of the show. The DVR schedules recording based on a fairly static program guide that gets updated every 2-3 days. That turned out to be an issue when trying to record The Good Wife since the shows is on Sunday nights at 9pm, but with the football games running longer in the afternoon, the show often ends up starting around 9:30pm or 10pm. The DVR doesn’t intelligently adapt to the change, so we schedule the show with an extra hour of recording to avoid any problems.

Unfortunately, while these improvements seemed promising, we have been testing the service for a few months now and came across several major problems that Altice is very slow to address or is not addressing at all.

A major problem is the fast forward feature. Unlike Verizon Fios TV DVR service, Altice One DVR Plus lacks the option to skip 30 seconds at a time. And because the recording is streaming from the server, the standard fast forward feature is extremely unresponsive. By the time you see the show starting, it’s much too late to press play. We usually found ourselves fast-forwarding well into the show, then having to rewind back into the last commercial and resume from there.

A further frustration of Altice One’s DVR Plus service is that is sporadically fails to record scheduled shows. Last week I had it scheduled to record Elementary, but the recording never happened. We have been seeing this happen intermittently; either the recording is completely missing, or it’s there but crashes the system when you try to play it back. This problem is especially frustrating in the case of shows like the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which aren’t available On Demand at a later time.

If all this wasn’t enough, the DVR playback menu doesn’t always work. I had some family and friends gathered in the living room recently to watch the latest episode of WestWorld. The DVR menu page wouldn’t load, and we had to call Altice’s customer service. After keeping us on hold for over 30 minutes, they needed to reprogram and reboot the cable box to get the DVR menu working again. A real party pooper. The DVR menu acted up an average of once or twice a week during the time we tested the DVR Plus service.

Space limitations are another major issue of the DVR Plus service. With the earlier Optimum DVR service, you could record just 24 hours of HD TV, while competitors offered the ability to record up to 300 hours. With the cloud-based DVR Plus service, you would expect Optimum to offer many more hours of available space to record. Inexplicably, Altice still limits you to 75 hours of HD recording, shared throughout the house. Yes, we said shared, because if you have four TVs in the house, you can only record 75 hours all together. We were baffled when we learned this. Why give the ability to record fifteen shows at once when you have such limited space on Altice’s server? There is no reasonable explanation for this.

Let’s now assume that you were actually able to record your favorite show in HD and get it to play back. While watching your favorite action scene in Suits, or the wheel spinning on Jeopardy, you suddenly notice a high amount of pixelation. The quality of the video has suddenly jumped from an expected 1080i HD to a low quality that’s worse than playing back a video stream on your cell phone 10 years ago! We were simply shocked at this and saw it happen time and time again, on different dates, different channels, and different shows. Upon further investigation we discovered that while Altice broadcasts all its HD programming in 1080i quality, when it comes to the “HD” DVR Plus, the video streamed back to your cable box is drastically compressed. This results in subpar and grossly pixelated video that is especially noticeable during quick movements like a camera panning or a fast action scene.

Several calls made weekly to Altice’s customer service have resulted in no resolution of these major issues.

At this stage we feel that Altice’s DVR Plus needs some drastic improvements to make the service viable for its customers. We currently do not recommend this service, but we hope that Altice will promptly address the issues at hand.

Wrong! Hard drive failure is a very common problem with today’s computers. Unlike today’s popular flash-based media that uses memory chips, hard drives still rely on their mechanical components. These can fail at any time – and if you didn’t back up your data or set up a RAID array, you are in trouble.

We encountered the same problems with one of our lab’s hard drives, one full of important files and data. We first tried to restore the data using different software recovery tools. These usually work if you have lost the master boot sector or if you have corrupted sectors on the drive. None of these software packages, including Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional software package, were able to restore any of the files. The drive was suffering from media corruption and minor internal mechanical problems.

We sent the drive to Ontrack for repair using their Data Recovery services. They have four labs located in the New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Washington D.C. metropolitan areas. After a few days we were sent a file listing the whole file structure of the corrupted hard drive. Using the Ontrack’s free VeriFile application, which runs on their website as an ActiveX application, we were able to view which files were recoverable and which were lost. VeriFile is a great and unique application that can be very useful when trying to recover your data. It’s a web-based software application that gives you a preview of what was restorable on your hard drive. It allows you to search the hard drive file structure for specific files or filter by several options including read-only, compressed and encrypted. In our case only a couple of files were lost.

Within a few more days we received an external hard drive containing all the recovered data. As an alternative we could have received the data on a set of several DVDs, but we opted for the more convenient external drive. All the files recovered were accessible. The total cost of this service was $1,500.

Ontrack Data Recovery did an impressive job at recovering our data. This can be valuable when you don’t have backup copies of your important files. We definitely recommend Data Recovery if you have vital information on your corrupted hard drive.

As a preventative measure we always recommend to do backups of your valuable files on a regular basis. If your computer is capable of a RAID array, it’s a great alternative to have two hard drives set up as RAID in mirroring mode.

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