Reading Time: 5 minutesDepending on what subscription plan you have, the Ring doorbell records a video every time it detects motion, someone rings the doorbell, and when you use the Live View feature. But, what happens when you accidentally delete an important Ring video? Well, you can recover deleted Ring videos in certain cases. Read the sections below to learn how.
How Long Does Ring Store Video
Ring has three tiers of optional subscription plans, each of which let you view and download video recordings. These include:
- Ring Basic,
- Ring Plus,
- Ring Pro.
Without a subscription plan, you can still view the live feed from your Ring device, but it will not record or store any videos on the cloud storage.
If you have subscribed to a Ring Protect plan, you can access recorded videos for up to 180 days via the Ring app and website, before they are permanently deleted from its servers. This time duration can be modified, so videos may be deleted earlier, depending on your selection. If you haven’t modified the settings, the default video storage time is 60 days.
In addition to videos, Ring also takes frequent snapshots throughout the day that are stored and accessed in the same way as Ring videos.
How to Tell If a Ring Video Was Deleted
The easiest way to tell if a Ring video was deleted, is to look for big gaps in the recorded activity. Additionally, if you’re sure someone rang the doorbell recently, and there’s no video recording available of the event, the video could have been deleted.
It’s easy to accidentally delete videos when you’re using the web version of Ring, because there’s no confirmation prompt after you press delete. However, the Ring app will confirm whether you really want to delete the video after you press the delete option.
It’s important to know that only Owner level accounts can delete videos from your Ring account. Shared users do not have the permission to do so.
After deletion, you may wonder if your Ring event history is missing, since there are no mentions of a video being deleted. This is because Ring doesn’t keep an event log of deleted videos at all.
Can You Recover Deleted Ring Videos
The chances of recovering your Ring videos directly depend on where they were deleted from. If the videos were manually deleted from your cloud storage or the storage duration expired, it’s impossible to get them back. Being a smart home device, Ring has to take user privacy seriously. Thus, the company uses a combination of AES encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) to encrypt your data.
But, if you downloaded the videos to a local storage drive, such as an HDD, SD card, SSD, USB drive, etc., you can recover the deleted Ring doorbell videos using a third-party data recovery program.
Disk Drill is a data recovery tool that we can confidently recommend if you’re looking to restore deleted Ring doorbell videos from your local storage device. The program has an easy-to-use UI and supports a wide range of video formats. It even lets you preview files before recovery. Disk Drill is available for both Windows and Mac users.
Windows users get a free trial, allowing them to recover up to 500 MB of data for free. Let’s see how you can find deleted ring videos and recover them using Disk Drill:
- Download Disk Drill and install it on your PC. If the Ring videos were downloaded on your computer’s internal storage, it’s recommended you download and install the program on an external storage device. Basically, don’t download and install it on the drive that contained the deleted Ring videos.
- Open Disk Drill, select the storage drive that contained the Ring videos, and click on Search for lost data.
- Disk Drill’s scan times are quite fast, so you don’t have to wait long before the scan is over. You can also view the scan results in real time. Either way, click on Review found items to view the recoverable data. Since we’re recovering deleted Ring videos, you can also choose to directly click on the Video option to filter the scan results.
- Use the checkboxes next to the files to select the ones you want to recover. Double-click on a video to see a preview of it. Once confirmed, click on Recover.
- Choose a recovery destination for the videos and click OK. Here, we recommend not saving the videos to their original location. Save them on a separate partition or storage drive.
- Disk Drill will recover the deleted Ring videos for you.
Conclusion
It’s best to keep Ring videos downloaded to your local storage if you can, because once deleted from the cloud, they’re impossible to recover. If you’re worried about running out of storage space, you can use other cloud storage solutions to keep backups of Ring videos. If the videos were deleted from your local storage, third-party solutions such as Disk Drill can help you recover them at a fraction of the cost of professional data recovery services.
