MicroSD record continuous or events only

hello all. been about a couple weeks or so since have swapped in my new wyze cam v3 at the house in front door side window (where have street lights available to give the v3 some light to work with at night), and put my older wyze cam v2 in the front porch window at parents’ house (where always have a porch light on at night). both working great. have CAM plus for both. very convenient.

and have samsung microsd cards in both cams. the microsd cards are set for continuous recording. BUT now wondering about setting the microsd cards for recording events only. would like to hear opinions how you all have set your microsd to record. whether continuous or events only.

one specific question i have is if you have your microsd recording events only, is that good enough to forego subscribing to CAM plus? like to have longer event-only recordings and to avoid the five minute cool down when no CAM plus? thanks.

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SD cards have a finite life expectancy measured in the number of write cycles so with continuous recording you’re shortening the life of the card pretty significantly.

For my use case I see no value whatsoever in continuous recording (assuming that event detection is working properly). It just creates a lot of video of nothing happening that has to be waded through if/when you’re looking for something specific.

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If you like the notifications, you need to keep a cloud service (camplus or atleast the free 12 sec/5 min cool down) because the local storage (sd card recording) doesn’t notify you of events.

I have continuous recording enabled on every camera now. That is my wish and want and have been lucky with sd cards. I have had a couple cards go bad due to the rewriting I believe but I know I didn’t use high endurance cards in those spots and knew the life expectancy.

I’ve had 32 GB SD cards in pan cams for about 2 yrs. Have always had them on continuous record. Many times I’ve wanted to see what happened before and after the 12 sec event. Purchased cards for $8-9 so if their life ran out today I would still see it as worth the cost to have continuous recording.

To each their own but the same thing can be accomplished by recording events only. I see no value whatsoever in recording hours upon hours of absolutely nothing happening. :thinking: If there is value, other than just personal preference, I’d like to know what it is.

There is a cool down period of about 5 minutes between 12 sec recordings. Below is an example of a posting by a member. If they had continuous recording, video of all of the thefts would have been captured on the card.

“So I had a couple bikes stolen last night and the cameras caught the first event, but they came back 2 minutes later to take the second bike and the camera did not record. This happened a few days before where we had a delivery and the delivery was recorded but not the theft a few minutes after. Is there some delay to record post event to reduce recordings I’m not aware of? This is frustrating since I missed out catching the bad guys twice in a few days.”

The cool down only applies to the 12 second clips stored on the cloud. Event videos stored on the local SD card are not restricted by either the 12 second limit or the 5 minute cool down.

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