[Philips, Sony, TCL Android TV] Director.Robert.Ford:
Hello. I have a 2018 model 4K TCL TV of the MT58 family. A few months ago I was in touch with TCL support of my country because my TV was malfunctioning, and OS updates were unable to fix the issues. The support engineer I was speaking with suggested that I avail a paid service for a technician visit. The technician was supposed to "replace" the entire OS software instead of doing any OS updates. The supposed TCL technician who turned up wasn't really a TCL employee; he was a contractor appointed by TCL to serve TCL customers in my city, and he didn't have a clue about what he was supposed to do. He started giving me some generic knowledge about Android updates. I immediately sent him packing because I didn't want some incompetent idiot experimenting on my TV and potentially making matters far worse for me. After trying a few things for a while, I was able to fix the issues on my own and get my TV back to normal working condition. It turned out that the issues were related to OS only and were caused due to TCL's wretched OS software system. Here's the kicker: the OS version I was facing the issues on a few months ago is the exact same version I have installed on my TV today (V8-T658T01-LF1V575), but the TV's behaviour back then and right now are completely different. The only reason my TV is functioning okay right now is because while trying to fix the issues, I sequentially installed different OS versions while eventually upgrading to V575 compared to the path of OS installations I took last time.

Anyways, the reason I am writing this post is that I want to know more about this "entire software system replacement" concept that the TCL engineer mentioned to me. I have been inside the service menus of my TV, and there are options to make backups of settings and EEPROM data to USB drives, and there are options to copy these settings and EEPROM data to the TV from USB. I tried making backups of the settings and EEPROM data to my USB pen drive, and ran into issues. First of all, NTFS and exFAT formatted pen drives and hard disks are no longer recognised on my TV. I even purchased Paragon NTFS software for my TV, but even that failed to work. Apparently I had misunderstood how that software worked, and hastily purchased it without researching it thoroughly. Only USB storage devices that my TV now recognizes are FAT32 devices. If I try to make a backup of settings and EEPROM data to a FAT32 formatted pen drive, only the settings are backed up to the pen drive, EEPROM data is not backed up. It does not come as a surprise considering that FAT32 file system allows a maximum file size of 4 GB and an entire EEPROM backup will need to save a 16 GB file to the USB device.

My question to everybody who owns a TCL TV is that, have you ever tried to make a backup of your system using the options present in the service menus? If yes, what results did you get? Could you backup the entire system? If you haven't tried it yet, could you try to make a backup of the TV's EEPROM data to your USB storage device and let us know what happens? I would certainly advise everybody to exercise caution and ensure that you choose the correct options and only backup your TV's data to the USB device. Let's hold off on restoring data back to the TV from the USB backups until we know more about this functionality, lest you end up screwing up your functioning TV.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation. Cheers!