Ring’s home security products are well-known in the world because of their functionality and strict approach to user privacy. Depending on the settings and your Ring Protect plan, the camera records a video each time it senses motion, the doorbell rings, and whenever you use the Live View feature.
But what happens if you accidentally delete a Ring video from your local storage or the cloud? Use our guide to know what you can do if your Ring footage is unavailable and how you can recover deleted Ring videos.
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Can I Recover Deleted Videos From the Ring Camera?
It depends on where the videos were deleted from. The videos are irrecoverable if you deleted them from Ring’s cloud storage service. However, any videos that were downloaded to a local storage and then deleted, can be easily recovered using a data recovery program.
Being a smart home company, Ring takes user privacy seriously. Consequently, Ring saves videos on secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers, with the videos being encrypted using AES encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard) and TLS (Transport Layer Security).
Ring keeps these recorded videos for up to 180 days (after which they are automatically deleted), depending on your location and settings. However, this feature is only available for users with a Ring Protect plan. Other users can only view the live feed from the Ring doorbell camera.
Ring Protect users can download and store their videos on a local storage device as well.
How to Tell If a Ring Video Was Deleted
Ring doesn’t keep an event log for deleted videos, so don’t be surprised if there’s no mention of them in the event history menu. It’s quite easy to accidentally delete videos from the Ring web interface because there is no confirmation prompt. The Ring application, on the other hand, will ask you for confirmation before deleting a video.
You can tell that a Ring doorbell video was deleted if there are any unusual gaps in the recording activity. Look for instances where you’re positive that someone rang the doorbell, yet there is no recorded activity of the same.
Search for specific Ring doorbell videos on your local storage device. If you’re unable to locate them, they could have been accidentally deleted.
How to Recover Deleted Ring Videos with Data Recovery Software
If you deleted Ring videos from a local storage device, you can get them back using data recovery software. But, it’s important to use only the best data recovery apps with a proven track record of recovering deleted videos.
For this tutorial, we opted for Disk Drill. It’s easy to use, compatible with all popular storage drives and file systems, and recognizes .mp4 videos (the video format used by Ring). Disk Drill is compatible with both Windows and macOS. In fact, Windows users can take advantage of the free trial which offers up to 500 MB of data recovery at no cost.
Let’s see how you can retrieve deleted Ring videos using Disk Drill:
- Download and install Disk Drill. Do this on a storage drive apart from the one which contained your deleted Ring videos.
- Open Disk Drill, and select the storage device which contained your Ring doorbell’s missing footage. Click on Search for lost data.
- Click on Review found items to view all the recoverable data Disk Drill discovered. Since you’re looking to recover video files, you can directly click on the Videos option to filter out the results.
- Expand the Deleted or lost and Reconstructed sections to view the deleted files Disk Drill discovered.
- Select the videos you wish to recover using the checkboxes. Typically, Disk Drill will automatically display a preview of the currently selected file. If it doesn’t, you can click on the eye icon next to the filename to see a preview. Click on Recover after confirmation.
- Choose a recovery destination. We recommend you save the Ring videos to a storage drive besides the one which originally contained them. Click Next.
- Disk Drill will recover the selected videos.
Conclusion
It’s only possible to recover deleted Ring footage if it was stored locally. Despite this, if you lost your Ring videos because of severe corruption or physical damage to the local storage drive, avoid using DIY data recovery methods. Instead, contact a professional data recovery service. It’s also advisable to regularly back up your files to protect against data loss.
