Yup, definitely, there have been many times where the SD card showed me important stuff from long before the “event” triggered - where the person came from in a distant corner of the FOV, etc.
I’ve gotten video of a neighbors car being broken into from a distance, people going up to cars and houses, etc. None of those would have triggered an event. So yeah definitely worthwhile to have. Maybe the stuff is too far to see “who” but seeing where/why/when/how are often useful.
All of my cameras have stopped recording clips of motion and only show snapshots of motion.
I have never had any subscriptions all of my wired cams have always recorded clips. The card still has clips up until 2/28/26 however when I try to view them from the cam it switches right to live view. The only way I can see the clips is from the SD card in my computer. These are basically worthless now without a subscription. I guess it time to move on I can no longer watch my Mother and Father like I used to. My cams are V3, I can’t even get a V2 to connect to my network now. 
Try formatting the SD card using the formatter from sdcard.org. Your symptoms sound like a card issue, it may have reached the end of its life or a power issue could have harmed multiple cards. If formatting doesn’t help, try a different card to see.
No subscription is required to record to SD card.
And if you’re going to use the formatter from sdcard.org (recommended!), don’t leave “Quick format” selected. Please select “Overwrite format” in order for the utility to do a deep dive checking the integrity of your card and masking out any irrecoverable areas:
Yeah if I suspect a card may have an issue somewhere I do the full overwrite. If not I’ll do the quick one, in this case a full overwrite is probably advisable.
For whatever reason my dash cams every 6 months or so will start complaining of write speed issues, and the quick format fixes that. I think they just make a mess of the card and there are too many files on it for FAT32 to keep up with (they’re old and don’t support anything else).
Have had mixed results with it being able to exclude bad cells, it seems to depend on the card/controller manufacturer, but zeroing everything out is good regardless. I have one card that nothing will fix, one bad spot somewhere, but others where it resolved what seemed to be permanent problems. Maybe that first one just ran out of spare cells to use.
Either type sets the proper offsets for the card, rebuilds the partition, etc, all good things.
Anytime I get a new card I do the full overwrite just to make sure it is all good.
Yep, I do all the same. I’ve been using Samsung Pro Endurance cards exclusively for the past 7 years except for 512GB cards. I think those 512GB cards are Samsung EVO cards, only because Samsung marketed no endurance rated 512GB cards at the time I bought them. I do low-level reformatting when new and every year or two thereafter when I have to remove my cams to clean my house siding. I haven’t had any of those cards go bad and all have been doing continuous writes for 7+ years. I’m glad I bought a stash of the 128GB and 256GB endurance cards before the prices skyrocketed.
The prices are insane, the 128 is up to like $50, I bought mine a couple years ago for $13.
The only two cards I’ve had fail on me were the standard orange Evos, though granted one was in a dash cam and was only 32GB which was definitely not its intended purpose. The other was in a phone for years and probably just too much constant heat. But they sent me replacements for both and upgraded them to Evo Plus 128GB which I’ve used for various things without issues.
The ones in my dash cams are Sandisk Extreme Pro 32GB and those are going on like 10+ years now, but some of the newer Sandisk don’t have great reviews.
I’ve been meaning to give Lexar a try. They’re middle of the road (and probably make the Wyze cards as they are a common white labeler) but photographers swear by them and they aren’t quite as pricey.
Of course right now even PNY isn’t really affordable. The memory industry is actually predicting that this demand is going to ease and have scaled back expansion plans so hopefully that is a good sign. They wouldn’t be doing that if they hadn’t already started to see a plateau or even drop off.
Micron ditched the consumer Crucial brand not long ago, I wonder if AI demand falls if they’ll bring it back. Hope so as they always had reliable memory and SSDs. Not the bleeding edge performers on benchmarks, but rock solid, which is more important anyway.
Fingers crossed, hopefully it isn’t like GPUs where it seems like it is here to stay.