No local drive recording but showing camera was activated

[AFM444]

I bought two Arlo Pro 3 cameras to add to my original 1080p cameras and connected to my VMB4000 base.  I do not have a service subscription.  Everything worked fine for the first 90 days during the trial.  All of my video from these two new 2k cameras went to local storage (USB 16GB Drive) and were accessible via my app on my IOS devices.  I activated these cameras on 2/21/22.  They quit storing video to my local drive on 5/21/22, the day that the 90-day trial ended.  Now, I still get a notification on the app that the camera has been activated, but the video does not show up in local storage after 90 days of working just fine.  I can access the camera remotely and turn on for live video and can also see that the last video recorded shows up on the devices page as recorded, but cannot access on the local drive through the IOS app.  Why would local storage of this video change after the 90-day trial, with or without a subscription?

[StephenB]

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@AFM444 wrote:

 All of my video from these two new 2k cameras went to local storage (USB 16GB Drive) and were accessible via my app on my IOS devices. 

Let's start by clarifying this.  None of the videos stored on your USB drive are accessible via the app.  The VMB4000 base doesn't support direct access to local storage.  The only way to access the videos on the USB drive is to eject the drive from the base, plug it into a PC, and look at the drive contents.

All the videos you see in the app are stored in the cloud.  Your older cameras came with 7-day free cloud storage, the Pro 3 cameras do not.  So no recordings in the app after the subscription ran out.

I suggest ejecting the USB drive, and examining it on a PC, in order to confirm that the Pro 3 videos are still being stored there.

Options include purchasing a subscription (of course), or getting a smarthub (VMB4540 or VMB5000) - which does support direct access to local storage.  There are some limitations

• recordings only accessible in the app (not the browser)
• recordings only accessible to the primary account (not friend accounts)
• no manual recordings or snapshots
• no thumbnails
• remote access requires router settings that some find difficult - and actually isn't possible with with some ISPs - including Starlink and T-Mobile Broadband.

[AFM444]

Ah, that makes sense.  What I was seeing was on the cloud and I assumed it was local that first 90 days.  Will review the subscription or base model options.  Currently just back to using my older cameras again for now.  A bit of fine print on local storage capabilities that didn’t apply to my base model when I got these cameras.  Live and learn.