I generally fill my DVR to capacity and then watch everything until it is empty before I allow myself to record anything further. The result of this is that I go crazy for three or four days and fill the 500gb drive and then spend about a month working through it. Not good for the serial dramas as I tend to miss a lot of episodes. Great fun though.

I've never understood people keeping their DVR clean... I have everything set to delete when space is needed (unless my gf or I are out of town on business) so after about 2 weeks, you snooze, you lose.

I get to what few TV shows I record within a day or two in most cases. When I signed up for Dish a year ago, I recorded all kinds of films with the free movie channels during those first 90 days. There's still some that I haven't seen yet.

Most shows I watch within a day or two, but there's usually a couple that sit there for about a week.

I still have the final two episodes of The Shield unwatched on my DVR. Hopefully they're good. I'll get to them someday.

That sounds about right, I don't think I have ever truly finished everything on it.

TV shows....probably within 2-3 days, assuming I'm not on vacation/travel and fall behind. Movies I record off premium channels -- they usually sit on the DVR for weeks before I get to them.

On two occasions I've had DVR's fail for one reason or another so keeping clean is just part of my paranoia.

I like to keep mine fairly clean (with a 500G drive, under 50%), but I also have a thing about letting it run empty. To me, that's a failure of some sort, because anything I might have recorded will probably be more interesting than whatever happens to be on TV at the moment, especially if there are commercials involved. So if I'm in danger of running low, I'll broaden my tastes and record a few things I might have passed over if the disc were fuller, like some indie movies on IFC or Sundance, or a few more oldies from TCM.

DirecTV?

Had two crap out on me already this year.

No actually. The first time was Time Warner and the second was Comcast. Both were due to updates they pushed through. My mom has a DirecTV DVR (non-HD) and she has had some issues but she learned from me to keep her DVR pretty empty.

I have two 500g dvrs from Fios and almost always have them at about 80% capacity.
I record a bunch of shows and movies so it's nearly impossible for me to catch up

The answer to this question is not a simple one.

For the most part I watch things within a week. Especially HD content.

Now, I recorded all 3 season of Jersey Shore (don't look down on me too much) when they had the marathon last week and because I recorded it on the SD channel, I'll watch those over the course of the next month.

Other than favorite shows that I'll watch that night, its always HD first.