What to Do When Your Scout Alarm Storage is Full
Your Scout Alarm system's cameras provide valuable visual evidence of events in your home, storing motion-triggered clips in the cloud. However, this cloud storage is finite. When you receive a "Storage Full" notification, it means your system can no longer save new video clips, potentially leaving you unprotected.
This guide will explain how to effectively manage your Scout Alarm's cloud storage, ensuring you always have space for new recordings. The process involves reviewing, downloading, and deleting old clips to free up your allocated storage space.
Understanding Scout's Cloud Storage
Unlike systems with local storage, Scout cameras save short, motion-activated video clips to a secure cloud server. Your monitoring plan determines the amount of storage space you have available (e.g., 1GB). Once this limit is reached, the system will stop uploading new clips until you manually clear some space. It's important to note that Scout does not automatically overwrite the oldest clips.
Why You Need to Manage Your Storage
- Ensure Continuous Recording: A full storage drive means no new events can be recorded. If a security incident occurs, your camera won't be able to save the footage.
- Preserve Important Evidence: Regularly reviewing your clips allows you to identify and save any important footage, such as evidence of a break-in, a delivery, or a noteworthy event.
- Maintain System Health: Keeping your storage from reaching its maximum limit ensures the system operates smoothly.
Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Scout Video Storage
Follow these steps to free up space and keep your cameras recording.
Step 1: Review Your Video Clips
The first step is to see what's taking up all the space.
- Open the Scout Alarm App: Launch the app on your smartphone or log in to the web dashboard.
- Navigate to the Timeline: Find the activity timeline or a dedicated 'Clips' section. This will show you a chronological list of all your recorded video events.
- Identify Unimportant Clips: Scroll through your history. You will likely find many clips triggered by routine, non-critical events like pets walking by or family members arriving home. These are the primary candidates for deletion.
Step 2: Download and Save Important Footage
This is a critical step. Before you start deleting, make sure you save anything you might need later. Once a clip is deleted from the Scout cloud, it is permanently gone and cannot be recovered.
- Select the Clip: Tap on an important clip to open it in the video player.
- Find the Download/Save Option: Look for a download, share, or save icon (it often looks like a cloud with a downward arrow or a standard share symbol).
- Save to Your Device: Tapping this icon will save the video file directly to your smartphone's photo gallery or files. From there, you can back it up to your computer or personal cloud storage service (like Google Photos, iCloud, or Dropbox).
- Repeat for All Key Clips: Go through your timeline and save every clip you consider important before moving to the next step.
Step 3: Delete Unnecessary Video Clips
Once you've secured your important footage, you can confidently start clearing space.
- Select Clips for Deletion: In the app's timeline, there should be an option to select clips for deletion. You may be able to tap an 'Edit' or 'Select' button to enter a management mode.
- Delete Individually or in Bulk:
- Individual Deletion: Open a clip you wish to delete and look for a trash can icon or a 'Delete' button.
- Bulk Deletion: The most efficient method is to use the 'Select' mode to tap and choose multiple clips at once. After selecting all the clips you want to remove, look for a single 'Delete' button to erase them all in one go.
- Confirm Deletion: The app will likely ask you to confirm that you want to permanently delete the selected clips. Confirm the action to free up your storage space.
By regularly performing this review and clean-up process—perhaps once a month—you can ensure your Scout Alarm system always has the necessary space to record the moments that matter most.