SD Card Removed Notification and Log

Someone recently stole my SD card from one of my cameras and I came up with some useful features that I think should be implemented. Thanks.

  1. Have an option to receive notifications whenever your camera gets unplugged or SD card removed.

  2. Under local storage settings in the app, provide information such as the date and time an SD card was last in the camera.

Locally recording the time camera is unplugged - don’t think that’s possible.

The server wouldn’t be able to differentiate between a network disconnect or the device getting unplugged.

Check the last recorded event on the Wyze servers, but I think that only goes back a week.

I think gcanhigh meant “offline” rather than unplugged. Here, offline can mean both network disconnection and cable being unplugged. I am excluding user’s hitting the “off” button to turn off the camera since it is intentional. However, network disconnection and cable being unplugged could mean malicious activities. I have another indoor security cam from another brand. It has this functionality.

Finally, notification when SD card is removed again without user’s turning off the camera is a good idea since this might also mean a malicious activity.

I want to extend this post by one more suggestion. It would be great if I could receive a pop up message when my SD card has XX GB of storage left so I wouldn’t need to keep checking it because I keep 7/24 logs for a reason for a while. In the menu of Wyze app, I can select XX GB, and when XX GB left, the app can show me a notification on my phone.

There’s no need to monitor remaining SD storage. The camera deletes old files as needed.

I know and that’s exactly what I don’t want to happen. I meant above I want to keep the recordings of 7/24. So I need to take out and copy the SD card before the old files are deleted.

In addition, recording sizes per day change depending on how often motions and sounds happened. That means I need to check the storage often because I cannot estimate how much left because I cannot know how much events recorded any day.

That will involve periodically taking out the SD card. That will inconvenience people who have installed their cameras at inconvenient places, e.g. up on the roof.

If there is even need to modify the app and/or firmware, to address the problem you’re describing, a local network storage is the way to go. In fact, there is already a proposal for it.

For a stopgap solution, you can always use a bigger SD card. Yes, they work, search the forum.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Indicator in app and notification for SD card issues

I believe this can help prevent unauthorized removal of the microSD cards and also notify people if they didn’t install it correctly and the microSD card becoming loose and coming out.

Seems like a solid idea. Inserting/removing the SD card probably happens seldom enough that a push notification wouldn’t be annoying or anything, and it has the potential to alert someone of a problem earlier than they might notice otherwise. (SD card failure or unauthorized removal.)

Some camera login errors are actually caused by SD card errors. Since login errors are re-tried many, many times, this will produce lots of notifications.

Camera login? I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean trying to pull up the “playback,” for example? Anyway, ideally, the card getting ejected would be the trigger. Not necessarily an “error” when attempting to connect. But I’m not sure what gets logged exactly. Hopefully the camera can tell the difference.

Sorry, I meant to say, camera livestream connect

Oh, interesting. SD card failures can prevent connecting to a livestream? I had no idea. Playback makes sense, but I didn’t know it might throw an error when connecting to the livestream. I can’t really imagine why those two things would be connected.

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Yes, it does. You’ll find cases here, where people are unable to get to the livestream but the problem clears up when a bad SD card is removed. Not very often but it happens.

I suspect this is done in the firmware as part of a quick hardware health check when the app connects to the camera.

I recently discovered that I had an SD Card failure. I’m my case, I discovered the symptoms about a day after the card stopped working for whatever reason (assume bad card) – I could see recording activity in the timeline, but could not view playback. But i didn’t figure out that the SD Card was not recording anything until 3 days later (when i was shocked to see 3 days of no activity on Playback, even though i had lots of events in the cloud).

Anyway, this is a long way around to say that I WISH that the app, or Wyze, had sent me an error message or email when the SD Card failed. Certainly, Wyze knows that Xcamera has an SD cards in it and is either recording continuous, event only or timelapse. When this programmed behavior is rendered impossible by a faulty or “missing” SD card, the system should throw an error code, and User should be advised.

The only thing worse than a security camera that doesn’t work, is a security camera that doesn’t work, but acts like it does. This is a major flaw in my book, and one that should be quickly and easily remedied.

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Requesting the ability to view system logs showing the removal of SD card from cameras. With events turned off by default, Im unable to attribute malicious activity such as stealing the SD card. While I have events turned on now, the basic logging of output devices would be ideal here.

Use case: I use Wyze cameras for continuous recording without alerting due to high traffic areas/false positives. Therefore, I’d like a way to determine when a card was removed. Seems like this data would exist on the underlying host of the camera.

Same request. I just noticed that both of my Pan Cams had lost access to their SD cards. I had to reformat the cards in my computer. They could have been this way for a very long time, as I have not had a reason to look at the recordings in a while.

If you can’t do a notification, then perhaps if the Record to SD Card setting is on, but the card isn’t working, show an overlay over the live video saying No SD Card Detected.

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Agree. Same thing happened to me.

Yea there’s got to be a way to get a push notification when the Wyze Cam stops recording to the SD card. There have been many times I needed a recording and when clicking on View Playback, I realize the card has failed and I don’t have the footage. I’m making it a habit to check all my cameras monthly which is super inconvenient.

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I use new branded SD cards and after a while they fail (SD cards always fail) but the only time you realise there is a fault is when you go to check playback

Could the camera send an alert if it detects a problem with the SD card? typically when the card fails and you check the settings the camera reports no card inserted so when it considers the card has been removed then send an alert that there is an issue with the local storage?

Thanks

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