I can’t upload attachement, but here is what happened.
Kids passed in front of my home and vandalised my Wyze Cam. I discovered that if the 1 min video or the clip is recording when the camera is shut down, it doesnt record, neither on the SD card or on the cloud.
To make this simple, if someone comes to your property and shoots down / break your Wyze cam fast enough, you won’t see anything about it and will have no trace of it.
Honestly, I already had plenty of problems with those cams, that’s the last nail. I am done.
“Sorry, new users can not upload attachments.”", yeah, [Mod Edit] you too.
[Mod Note]: Post edited to conform to the Community Guidelines.
Yes if a clip is in the process of recording when power is removed or the cam is damaged, you’ll likely end up with no file or a corrupted one on the SD card. If there is a corrupted file, you may be able to repair it with software and get something out of it.
For cloud recordings, the clip has to finish uploading before power is interrupted or it won’t be there at all.
These are both just how the technology works and is a drawback to cams that work in this manner. Putting the cams out of reach can help, but the only real “solution” is to use local streaming. RTSP to a server on your network is one option, or a closed circuit camera system that sends video to an NVR sitting on your network (sort of the same thing) is another. That way even if the cams are damaged, the footage up until they shut down is safe.
Note this is a limitation of all brands of “cloud cam” or cams that record locally or upload a video to an internet server, not limited to Wyze.
Dave27 had some good info. Just to piggy-back on to what he said, you might try placing some of your cameras inside looking out.
If you must have your cameras outside, you could have multiple cameras with overlapping views. The Top Left camera is my backyard. The other 3 cameras have overlapping views of my front street.
If bad kids are vandalizing one camera, your other cameras may record them and save the videos to the Cloud.
This is because for the SD card, the video is recorded in the RAM until it hits 60 seconds then that recording is copied to the SD card. If some breaks the camera while the video is in the RAM before it’s copied to the SD card then it won’t be on the SD card.
However if they enter the view at 0:00:58 and break the camera 3 seconds later, they will still be recorded in the last 2 seconds of the previous 1 minute recording. They don’t always have 60 seconds of leeway.
V3 cams Also upload 12 seconds cloud recording for most free users. Which means that if they haven’t broken it within the first 12 seconds they will still get recorded.
As Dave said, this is a common issue for most cameras unless you use something like RTSP to record to a NAS or your personal computer locally and V3 cams support doing this for free so you wouldn’t miss anything at all up to the last fraction of a second. V3 models are already capable of this protective measure.
Another helpful thing to do is to mount them out of reach and have multiple cameras overlapping each other for redundancy. Keep some with a low profile (basically hidden/discreet) instead of flaunting them with flashing status lights, visible IR glows, spotlights, etc.
I haven’t looked that closely at how the Wyze cams file system behaves, I know the dash cams in my car, if there is an “incident” they will instantly write the previous file even if it hasn’t hit the 30 second interval, then they have a battery (newer ones use supercapacitors) to give them enough time to write the incident video if they lose power. I’ve never tried yanking the power to see if the entire minute is in RAM or if it is writing sequentially to the SD card. I thought it was the latter (with cloud being buffered and uploaded all at once). But that may be a faulty assumption on my part.
I know the wyze cams have no power backup so will lose the file that is current in progress, I’m guessing they also don’t break up the files when an “event” happens, but that wouldn’t be a bad idea. When an event triggers, write that file regardless of how long it has been and start recording a new one (potentially in 15 second intervals until the motion stops). But that’s unlikely to get added if it isn’t already baked in.
