Wyze cameras downloading about 1Gb of data every night

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#1

Hi,

For a couple of weeks i have 1 out of my 5 wyze cams V2 downloading between 900Mb and 1 Gb of data every night, usually between 1 am and 2 am in the morning.

I have a router that let me see the upload and download data consumption of each so i can easily pinpoint what device is doing what.

I opened a support ticket and the generic answer i got was that i should lower my resolution in order to decrease data consumption. What the support person didn’t understand is that if events and viewing the camera was the culprit then i would see a very high amount of UPLOAD (camera -->internet) data but in my case is the camera DOWNLOADing somehting (internet -->camera). After i made this point i got radio silence out of wyze support… Disappointing

I cannot think of a reason of the camera needing to download so much data, specially on a daily basis and to make things worse a couple of days ago another of my cameras started to exhibit the same behavior.

Has any one noticed something similar on their setups?

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#2

Hi @cantu.luis. Could you please provide your support ticket number? I’m going try to get Wyze eyes on this. :slight_smile:

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#3

Yeah, I would also like the support ticket number for this one. I’ll also escalate this to someone better equipped for a question like this than I am.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Dread!

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#4

Hi, what is the version of your camera? can you share out the MAC address of it? I haven’t heard about a similar issue before. The only thing I can think of is that your camera may reboot frequently without being noticed. Our older f/w downloads a module (for person detection v1) from the network due to small size of storage. The latest version doesn’t do it anymore.

To check it yourself, you can put an SD card inside it and set it for continuous recording. After one night, you can check if the camera has any minutes that didn’t record. Every unrecorded time should be a reboot (for about 2 minutes). I am curious what the result is.

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#5

Hi all

thks for the answers, my ticket number is 490181

MAC for the first camera that started with this behavior 2CAA8E1B07B8
MAC for the second camera that have just started showing this 2CAA8E21D043

Thanks a lot for the tip about it downloding the person detection firmware, that may be the case as im still running fw 4.9.5.36 (didnt wanted to lose person detection so i didnt upgraded on purpose)

Yesterday night both cameras downloaded 2gb of data each, from like 1 am until 8 am.

I will just upgrade the firmware now and see if that changes behavior

I was also thinking on running a wireshark capture to see where are they connecting but im usually asleep at 1 am when they start doing this :slight_smile: so i have missed to do the capture

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#6

Cool! Let’s see how it goes after you upgrade. Thanks1

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#7

Something wrong is going on with these two particular cameras.

  • Tried to upgrade the firmware individually on them and failed 3 times in a row
  • Power cycled them and try the upgrade individually 2 times on each (power cycling in between) failed again
  • Ran a fw upgrade to all my cameras (2 are having the issue, 3 are not) the ones not having the issue upgraded without problems, the bad-behaved ones failed again
  • Power cycled the cameras again and tried another fw upgrade which failed

Any other suggestion to get this fixed?

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#8

It would be practically impossible for it to be rebooting that often to be chugging down 2GB of data in 7 hours, pulling down the model, which isn’t that big AFAIK. You sure this is WAN traffic, and not LAN?

#9

yeap, this is wan traffic. Im almost sure that something is broken with these two cameras, just the fact that they are not accepting a fw upgrade is a bad indicator

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#10

Really odd behavior, don’t suppose it shows what the cam is connected to?

Did you try a manual firmware flash yet?

#11

I would rope this cam off and run Wireshark to capture and analyze the traffic

#12

How do you do do a manual firmware upgrade?

#13

how do you get a cam to download the memory card to a Mac or to a ?

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#14

Here are some instructions on how to do that

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#15

After several tries I was able to upgrade the firmware. This seems to have solved the downloading issue but now both cameras seem to be continuously uploading data from 2 am to 8 am in the morning.

I really dont have the time to keep playing with this. I will just file a warranty claim to get them replaced…

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#16

Opened another ticket for a warranty claim and the support person suggested a factory reset which is a reasonable ask just to make sure that everything is ok.

I have been experiencing disconnections/difficulties to connect (takes a long time for the app to connect to the camera, and display video etc.)

Today that i pulled out my ladder to go up and do the factory reset i noticed that the cameras are doing a “click” sound every so often, just like the one they do after a reset.

I wonder if they are stuck in a boot loop and that is what is causing the problems

Did the factory reset, nothing changed tough…

#17

I had a continuous clicking issue with one of my cameras before. Traced it down to the USB power source (I was using a light socket with built in USB outlet). Once I replaced my power source to one of the wyze supplied AC adapters, clicking has since stopped and camera has been working properly.

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#18

Hi @cantu.luis. Do you have an SD card installed in that camera? That clicking you noticed when checking the camera sounds like it’s constantly resetting. If so, this may be a possible issue with the SD card either needing a format, or it has gone bad.

#19

Great suggestions, thanks a lot.

Im using the Wyze provided power supply and cable but what i will do is that i will swap one of my working cameras and one of the non working ones so that i leave the non working camera with the cable and power supply of the working one and viceverza.

Im indeed using an SD card and continuosly recording. I will take it out as well to test

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#20

I had the clicking issue with the supplied power supply (reminds me, should file a claim). Plugged it in to another adapter and it has been working fine since.