topic Re: External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help! in Arlo Pro 4

External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help!

MattHatter — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 23:28:02 GMT

Hello.
I have setup my Pro4 Cameras and VMB4540 Smart Hub Successfully. I have connected my 1TB Tosiba external HDD. It has formatted successfully. Shows a status of "ready". Record locally is turned "on" as well as "automatic overwrite" and "Best local recording" options.

However, it shows 0.00GB used. After "Removing Safely" and plugging into a PC, there are no videos saved. As if it's not saving any recordings that the cloud is saving to the HDD.

What am i missing?

Re: External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help!

DannyBearAgain — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 05:41:57 GMT

What you are missing is the ability to make manual recordings that get stored on the USB backup storage device.

No arlo camera has ever had this feature ability, as per design although technically possible since you can have triggered recordings saved.

Although the feature has continually been requested in the past, arlo has never explained why it never gets implemented.

Re: External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help!

MattHatter — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 06:09:20 GMT

Thankyou Danny, I appreciate your reply.
However, I wasn't referring to any "manual recordings" being saved to a USB drive.

I did however find a potentially useful solution.

The external HDD I have purchased uses NTFS formatting. Turns out Windows 10 does not allow for FAT32 Formatting since it's so outdated. I have done some research and found that I need to use command prompt in order to format this new technology to FAT32 in order to be compatible with this "technologically advanced" security system I have purchased.

Due to the fact that it is 1TB, it's taken roughly 4 hours to get to 50%. So ill check in the morning and retry.

Again. I simply want the automatic videos that are successfully being recorded to the "cloud" to also be saved to my hard drive. I am simply having trouble accomplishing this task that should be pretty simple.

Re: External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help!

StephenB — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 10:14:31 GMT

@MattHatter wrote:

Due to the fact that it is 1TB, it's taken roughly 4 hours to get to 50%. So ill check in the morning and retry.

It does need to be FAT32. But you could have formatted it directly in the base station.

In any event, it shouldn't take ~8 hours to format 1 TB disk even at USB 2 speeds. I am thinking the drive might be defective.

Re: External Hard Drive is not storing recordings. Help!

MattHatter — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 21:17:07 GMT

I discovered the solution.

The cameras were added before the hub was purchased. After adding the hub to the system, the cameras were not paired. I removed the cameras and re-added them to the hub afterwards. All is well now 🙂

Order of operations 😩😅