Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I need help! I want a small pocket camcorder but I'm not sure which one to get. I don't want to fall into the hype of the Flip because I worry two hours won't be enough. What should I be looking for when considering a small camcorder and where can I get a good quality one with expandable memory? Thanks!"
I would imagine that he didn't download anything, he DVR'd them.
Losing the contents of my EHD for my Dish DVR is also something that bothers me. I'm looking into a backup strategy at some point, the disks are basic GNU/Linux ext3 formatted volumes, so in theory it's at least possible to copy the movies to a back-up location but it's not clear to me that copying them to another EHD will "just work". I'll have to play with it.
At this point I'm interested to know if XStreamHD will work as an on-demand PPV service, or use a subscription model.