Camera not filling external hard drive?

[jplank1983]

I have a local hard drive connected to my base station. I looked in the settings and noticed it was using only 0.10 TB used of 1.82 TB. I've owned the Arlo cameras for several years. I was expecting that the cameras would fill the hard drive with videos and when it was close to filling the hard drive, earlier videos would be overwritten. So, I was surprised that only 0.1 TB was used. Why aren't the cameras using the entire hard drive and is there a way to make it so they do?

[TomMac]

The base system use FAT32, and is prob set up in a partition smaller than the total drive.

As mentioned earlier, it is better to use a usb or mem stick.

[jguerdat]

.1TB equals ~100MB which, depending on how many recordings you have and how long they are, is a lot of recordings. If you safely eject the drive and plug it into a computer you can check dates and sizes to verify all is good. Like TomMac, though, I use a much smaller thumb drive which is more easily managed. A 2TB drive is gross overkill unless you want to preserve the system's lifetime.

[jplank1983]

Thanks. Yes, I was hoping to preserve recordings for a long time. Looking at my cameras, it seems that the recordings only go back a week prior and I hoped to keep them for longer. Am I understanding correctly though that if the hard drive is formatted as FAT32, then the Arlo should continue to fill the hard drive beyond just 0.1 TB?

[jguerdat]

The system will continue to use the drive up to the 2TB FAT32 limit. 

I use various smaller thumb drives and just copy the files onto my NAS (I could just save to a computer) once a month. Even if you did this once every 6 or 12 months a 64GB drive would likely suffice and the videos would be available as needed. Long-term storage on any single drive is questionable so multiple locations and/or a storage device with redundancy (RAID configuration) would be a better solution if you want everything forever.

[Dannybear]

Just to add that if you’re using an early version of the app, they had issues with reporting the USB device usage correctly.
Also the software will only use 80% of the USB capacity before it starts overwriting the easiest recordings.
The fact that you’re only getting the last 7days of recordings is new to me so I better check my USB device for this as it could be a new arlo feature.

[jplank1983]

I had a look at the drive in a partition manager program and it looks like it's actually already formatted to have a 2 TB partition with FAT32:

https://imgur.com/a/BSaseCm

(The drive used in Arlo is Drive 2 in the image)

Could there be any other reason why only 0.1 TB is being used?

[jguerdat]

An issue is that "0.1TB" is a gross indication of space used. At a bare minimum you need to know MB used. Safely eject the drive and view the stats on a computer. Do this regularly for a while to verify that used space is actually going down appropriately based on the videos being stored. You can also check timestamps on the files to prove that old videos are still there while new ones are being recorded.

[jplank1983]

Thanks. I took a closer look at the files and saw that there are actually videos going back further than just a week, as I'd originally thought. The reason I thought the videos only went back a week was because I could only see one week of videos when viewing the videos in https://my.arlo.com/#/login. However, when I look at the hard drive in windows explorer, I see videos with date stamps that extend much further back. Can anyone help me understand why there's a discrepancy? Why don't all the videos from the external hard drive show when I log into the website?

[jguerdat]

The free 7 day plan you have for your Pro 2 cameras is just that - 7 days of cloud recordings. The local storage doesn't have that restriction - everything is recorded until you delete them or the drive fills. Thus, the cloud recordings will always be limited to 7 days (unless you get a subscription and then it will be 30 days) while local recordings maintain the complete time period.

[jplank1983]

Ok, thanks. That's what I was looking for. I didn't realize I was only viewing the videos available from the cloud. Since the only way to access the settings on the Arlo itself was through the website, I assumed I was viewing the actual videos available on the hard drive as well when I logged into the site. Thanks for your patience in helping me with this. 🙂

[dcfox1]

If you have an older base such as the VMB4000 you need to pull the USB and view them in a computer as you found out. Even on the newer smarthubs you can only view local in the App, not the Web page.