Videos on base station but not cloud?

[Wirides]

After a largely disappointing experience with arlo overall, I reactivated my smart plan to do some experimenting before I abandoned the trash system all together. Without the plan I was getting constant useless notification because everything is classified simply as motion. Now with the smart plan set to only vehicle and people, those are the only videos even being recorded to the cloud. The other missing videos are being stored locally. So if arlo misses identification, which it often does, no video is uploaded to cloud. To make it worse, at night lights will be seen as motion before a vehicle is in my driveway so the system is recording locally and no notification results for the vehicle. Why are reflecting headlights even setting the camera off at night? Any final suggestions before I scrap it and move on to WYZE?

[jguerdat]

You don't understand the system. Smart does exactly what you say - post-processing by the servers eliminates those subjects you have chosen to not be stored in the cloud. Local recordings don't have anything to do with Smart so all are recorded. You can donate videos from cloud recordings to help the team tweak the IDs.  Allow all recordings in Smart to do this.

Also, it's not the lights that are detected - it's IR emissions. Setting zones and modifying motion sensitivity can help tons. Works fine here with minimal false triggers.

[Wirides]

That's completely stupid. Again, when arlo fails to properly identify a person which happens often there's no video in cloud. The smart system should filter NOTIFICATIONS not recordings all together.

Regarding the issues with reflecting light, the issue comes from headlights hitting a parked car in my driveway. No way to eliminate that with zones, probably not with sensitivity without gutting the rest of the area.

[MVT]

What's the point of paying a subscription fee for server storage if the (un)"smart" algorithm is going to decide what is stored on the server?  What if you don't have or don't want to manage local storage?  In order to facilitate a 3 second lookback, the Arlo camera has to essentially be continuously recording!  Are you inferring that in order to get complete activity recordings one has to enable a local storage method?  It's not unreasonable to expect all motion detected be recorded to the paid cloud service and stored for the 30 days as contracted. The "smart" settings infer that you what you want notification for particular events - after all they are referred as "smart NOTIFICATIONS".  One would assume that recording locally is a BACK-UP of recordings that are purged after the 30 days of server storage.  Even with all smart notifications checked, I still have noticed recordings appear to be missed.  I see people leave who were never recorded coming!  That is a huge problem.

[Wirides]

I agree 100%. Just today I met my wife for lunch and never received a notice she left the garage IN A VAN the software clearly failed to identify as a vehicle. I can't check the local storage to see if it recorded there but I suspect it was. Either way, no notification and no cloud video. Maybe today the arlo fanboys can blame the rain or phases of the freaking moon.

[MVT]

I had a spiderweb alert as a vehicle on the back patio!  shadows alert as multiple different items.