There was a theft in my area, and I thought I would finally prove the usefulness of my v3 camera. The cloud events captured the headlights of a vehicle in the snapshot, but when I try to play the cloud video in the app, it says “Failed to Upload”.
No worries - I have Continuous Recording enabled on my microSD card. When I view Playback through the app, it says “No video at the selected time”, and in fact there’s no green-timeline video content for multiple days around the event, as if it was not performing any continuous recording at all.
When I insert the microSD card into my computer, I see numerous folders. It appears there is one folder for each day of recording. However, many folders are completely empty. Some folders are recordings from 6-8 months ago (which shouldn’t be possible since I only have a 32GB card, so everything that old should have been overwritten a long time ago). And there’s no folder with the date of the theft.
When I inserted the microSD card back into the camera, it appears to have started recording again, so I don’t think anything is wrong with the microSD card.
At this point, I’ve decided the video wasn’t captured because continuous recording to the microSD card just seemed to stop without any notification, error or warning. And it wasn’t captured to the cloud even though there was an event snapshot for it.
But does anyone know how to prevent this from occuring again? Am I supposed to:
check all my cameras every day to see if they are continuously recording?
reboot the cameras daily with a smart plug or smart switch?
press “Restart Camera” in the app daily?
press “Reset Services” in the app daily (since I have Cam Plus)?
I’ve never experienced that with any of my cams but I don’t have v3s. I reboot them once a week just out of precaution (done via automated rule). Are there any folders on the SD card that look out of place? Some reports that some cams will record to a totally different folder that is only visible on PC if they lose power or internet for a certain amount of time. But the fact that your video also didn’t upload seems like it was a camera issue and not SD.
Once you’re positive the footage is not on the SD, I would format it, sounds like it is pretty messy. Perhaps it is starting to fail.
It’s not just that “old” footage is overwritten, it’s actually the “oldest” footage is overwritten when the card is full. On your card, what’s the date of the latest or newest footage? Being that it’s a 32 gig card, it would only have a couple days worth. I bet your oldest footage is only a few days older than your newest footage before the camera stopped recording to the card.
I make sure to use high endurance card in my cameras, these are cards that are made to handle the write/rewrite cycles.
You can format the card in a computer, that usually works better than the format process from the camera.
You can set camera restarts via automations. Use a scheduled rule to reset cameras at a certain time, I have done this at odd times of the night as to not hopefully miss anything during the day.
Oldest folder with recordings was Jan 14, 2024. Then one folder in Feb. Another 4 in April, 19 in May, 11 in June, 15 in July, and 7 in Aug. So it definitely wasn’t recording continuously.
I’d recommend keeping an eye on it, if it seems to start doing it again, probably time to replace the microSD.
The only time I had a cam stop recording was back in the beginning when I was waiting for a couple additional good SD cards to come, I had a 32GB one that had previously been in a dash cam and had started having issues. Figured it was better than nothing temporarily, but that one hit a certain spot and stopped recording. I believe I did get a warning when I went into the cam that there was an SD card issue but I don’t remember 100%. It also showed some weird symptoms on the SD card screen, maybe only partially full but 0MB available, or 0MB used, or something (was a year ago so don’t recall exactly).