I have external HDD's and move shows over to it SPECIFICALLY to guard against losing such content in the eventual event of an internal HDD failure. Often, but not always, your box will start to exhibit strange behavior for, perhaps days, before the complete failure. Having experienced a number of internal HDD failures over the years with lots of Dish DVR's (noting unusual, just par for the course with internal HDD's running for many years) I always make sure to transfer shows I haven't yet when the box is acting strange, most often getting warnings more than once in a very short period about having lost part of a recordings or trying to playback a show only to have the error message state that it can not playback and this occuring to other shows attempted to playback withing days of each other. Those are two of the biggest signs the HDD is near death. Just like people, all HDD's will DIE.
