Got the same exact warning RSaunders. I’ve had the service barely a month, purchased the “Plus” tier a year at a time both for the savings and the 60 days storage. I went whole hog, after seeing how many people in the area are being robbed during the pandemic. I have a wired system that has 3 cameras, CCTV (color/audio) with only local storage capability. It’s been fine up until now, but with all the home breakins going on I wanted extra reassurance. I read up on having to download my videos a few weeks into storing them, so that I did not lose them.
My problem is that everything older than 1 week says “Processing, unable to retreive” OR “This video has been deleted.”
Let me be clear. I have not deleted any videos. Nothing. I was going through them again today to make sure I was caught up, had the important ones downloaded, as my account is now a month old. I have 60 days to download the videos.
Supposedly.
Anything older than about a week to 10 days is gone. I “had” full-face videos of local prowlers that the police are looking for, have posted pictures of, and offered to provide proof that they had indeed been roving through folks back yards. I “had” perfectly clear full body videos of my sisters boyfriend vandalizing a neighbors property and car - more covid related madness. I’m unable to even access them, and am being repeatedly told I must have cleared the alerts for them in my app. Even though that begs the question “Why the heck would you use that method, on a mobile device, to permanently delete stored videos, potentially of crimes?!?!” Aren’t there evidence laws that data/cloud providers have to comply with simply to do business here in the US?
Regardless of how stupid using that method without at least a triple check/warning system in place, and hey how about an undelete, just in case? … I never deleted any videos. I certainly never chose to erase any alerts. This looks like a case of serious hardware failure that is getting blamed/excused by pointing at the customer and saying “We told you it was permanent!”. Simply following some industry “best practices” could simplify your support problems, clear up a lot of customer complaints (I’m betting), AND make it almost impossible for any single full SAN/DAS/NAS failure to completely take out any customers data.
Needless to say, I’m not too happy. I bought 4 cameras, and one of the doorbells. I believe I got the entire package for under $500, and almost immediately signed up for the “Plus” tier so that I would have 60 days total to get those valuable videos downloaded.
All for nothing. Any time I try to access any video older than about a week, I get one of two error messages - “Your video is processing, please try again later”, or “This event’s video has expired or been deleted”.
If things continue in their current state, I feel I’ve wasted good money on a system that does not perform as advertised. Additionally, I’ve paid an extra $100 for a “service” that is essentially worthless. I didn’t even get 2 weeks to download my videos, much less 60 days. I’ve worked in IT, systems/network admin for close to 30 years. I was a developer before and during that. I did not use the “clear alerts” “feature”, so that’s not the source of whatever this issue is, but I can tell you that this is a completely unacceptable way to include this functionality within the application. As soon as I saw the warning, I cringed. Simply seeing that the “feature” is included in the application, and the way it is coded to delete without the possibility of recovering… unacceptable. The fact that it’s included in a shipping version of the application? Worse than unacceptable.
I spent the last several decades reading up on any and all “best practices” that I could find when working as a systems and network admin, and I did the same sort of research when coding. There are simply things that you do not include in a shipping version of the application, unless there are multiple levels of both explanation AND chances to cancel out. Nobody should be given the ability to wipe their entire video recording library for their security system with one command, a swipe. It should be hidden behind a few layers of warnings, some red borders, some flashing lights and sirens.
Better yet, implement a couple of the Microsoft or Amazon Cloud Services/Data Storage, Redundancy and Security Best Practices. Your service will be far more reliable, and capable of handling a simple “Could you restore this for me?” request.
If I had known Ring was going to be this unreliable, I would have been backing up to my (lifetime) 2TB pCloud cloud storage drive, that I picked up on sale for a little over $200. A tad expensive for a hard drive, but one you can reach from anywhere on the net, fully encrypted?
If Ring cannot improve their service and app, I see no reason to recommend it nor use it myself. As it stands, I have slightly over a week of videos to comb through and quickly get them transferred. Since I have been unable to even reach a support person, and was turned instead to the forums, has anyone else ever run into error messages like this? And is Ring so backwards that they truly do not do their own backups, offsite and remote mirroring? There are companies that exist solely to provide these services to corporations, at extremely reasonable rates. Hundreds to thousands of TB, for less than the cost of a 2 person team to handle the task.
It would have been cheaper and more reliable to go CCTV, and upgrade the one I have to something accessable via the internet.
I do have an additional bit of info that may help - I’m hoping that the app is not designed this way… NONE of my videos show any indication that they are in a “processing” state nor that they are deleted. They look exactly like all the recent ones, that I can indeed download. Does this point to (hopefully!) something fixable?