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"Record Locally" Option in Android App not Consistent with Web UI

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bestgio
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This has been a very frustrating experience setting up the Arlo Pro 3. I'm trying to have all my recordings be done locally and also enable Direct Storage Access using port forwarding. I have been trying to diagnose my problem and also discovered a few quirks while diagnosing:

 

First off, the hard drive. The hard drive is a WD 2TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive which has already been formatted to FAT32 and I've double checked the drive to make sure there is only one partition in the drive.

I can see my hard drive connected to the SmartHub by going to my.arlo.com and can confirm that my hard drive is listed there as "Ready" and USB Device Recording also enabled.

 

The Arlo app on my phone has been extremely inconsistent in detecting that there is a hard drive plugged into the SmartHub. There are times where the app does detect my hard drive plugged in and thus the "record locally" option gets enabled and I can see the rest of the options such as enabling direct storage access and port forwarding options. This is when it works as expected. Unfortunately, this isn't my experience for most of the time.

 

Most of the time, the app doesn't see that my hard drive is plugged in and thus the "record locally" option is disabled and I can't enable it manually. This causes the direct storage access to not work anymore while I'm not connected to my home network since I can't access my local recordings. The strange thing I noticed is that even when the "record locally" option appears to be disabled in the app, I can still view my local recordings while I'm at home connected to the same WiFi router as my SmartHub. I also verified by going to my.arlo.com and sure enough, the hard drive is still present in the website and "Ready." Any triggered events that causes my cameras to record still records successfully to both the cloud (since I'm still on the free trial) and also to my local storage.

 

When it comes to troubleshooting, I have reformatted my hard drive a bunch of times and restarted the SmartHub but my issue is still present. Even after restarting the SmartHub, it would still not detect my hard drive in the app. The app seems like it wants to "work whenever it feels like" is how I would describe my experience with the mobile app.

 

Now I'm not sure where the fault is happening either the SmartHub or the mobile app, but it would be really nice if this weird quirk can be resolved so that I can still access my local recordings when I'm not at home AND to have the hard drive be detected consistently in the mobile app like it should be.

 

I would also like to ask why can't we enable the "record locally" option and manage Direct Storage Access in my.arlo.com? It seems like the web UI is more consistent in terms of recognizing the hard drive and maybe it might be useful if we can enable local recordings and direct storage access over there instead of only relying on the mobile app.

 

I would be happy to provide more information if it helps!

Any help is greatly appreciated! (Sorry for the lengthy post)

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