# How long do you hold on to dashcam video for?



## emaja (Dec 31, 2018)

Uber support told me that pax only have two weeks to submit feedback or file a claim. For some reason, I doubt that...

So, how long do you hold on to your video for? I’ve got limited hard drive space and like to keep my disk as clean as possible. I’m not a digital pack rat. 

I only drive on Fridays and Saturdays with a rare few hours on Sunday to meet the quest if needed. I have room for about 16 days of video which amounts to almost two months. 

What say you?


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## FLKeys (Dec 27, 2018)

I hold approximately 3-4 months worth of dash cam footage. This includes footage of all my driving, ride share or not. I have a total of 6 gb's on two different USB hard drives. Ultimately it comes down to how much storage you have or how much money you want to spend on storage.

If any trip has what I would consider an issue I will save those files for a few years.


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## estore009 (Oct 14, 2017)

FLKeys said:


> I hold approximately 3-4 months worth of dash cam footage. This includes footage of all my driving, ride share or not. I have a total of 6 gb's on two different USB hard drives. Ultimately it comes down to how much storage you have or how much money you want to spend on storage.
> 
> If any trip has what I would consider an issue I will save those files for a few years.


Do you think it is a good idea to download some event footages to your phone?


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## FLKeys (Dec 27, 2018)

estore009 said:


> Do you think it is a good idea to download some event footages to your phone?


I don't have enough resources on my phone. If I have a specific event I will save it to multiple places including the cloud.


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## SpiritWanderer (Mar 20, 2018)

You may want to check out this thread I created asking the same advice. It's posted under the Advice section. Here's the link for it
https://uberpeople.net/threads/how-long-do-you-keep-dashcam-footage-before-deleting-it.315824/


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## emaja (Dec 31, 2018)

No consensus there either. Bummer.

Right now I have about 2 months worth. I have room for about another 2 months between my PC and an external hard drive. 

Don’t know how those people are getting such small,file sizes. Mine are flippin’ YUGE.


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## jiglum (Aug 29, 2017)

I actually decided to finally get a dash cam after a) getting a hit and run and b) listening to news about the last supreme court justice confirmation, where things were being said by actual legit US Senators who straight faced said things like; "If a woman makes an accusation, I'm going to believe it because it's probably true...etc etc." Well I drive drunk women who are alone often, like at midnight, and (not often...) but sometimes they get flirtatious or are just in a bad place so I decided to get a cam that faces interior also. My card holds about 4 days, and I do feel a little concern for the person who gets around to hiring a lawyer and accusing me of something a month or more later. Maybe its time to get more cards. I do think a couple of months could turn out to be way too little. Sigh..

Here is the dash cam I got, by the way. It shows great night vision in the car without showing any infrared (night vision) lighting.


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## FLKeys (Dec 27, 2018)

jiglum said:


> I actually decided to finally get a dash cam after a) getting a hit and run and b) listening to news about the last supreme court justice confirmation, where things were being said by actual legit US Senators who straight faced said things like; "If a woman makes an accusation, I'm going to believe it because it's probably true...etc etc." Well I drive drunk women who are alone often, like at midnight, and (not often...) but sometimes they get flirtatious or are just in a bad place so I decided to get a cam that faces interior also. My card holds about 4 days, and I do feel a little concern for the person who gets around to hiring a lawyer and accusing me of something a month or more later. Maybe its time to get more cards. I do think a couple of months could turn out to be way too little. Sigh..
> 
> Here is the dash cam I got, by the way. It shows great night vision in the car without showing any infrared (night vision) lighting.


That is the one I have, when you get it upgrade the BIOS so you can max out the sim card size. My only complaint with it is I wish it had a little meter on it showing how full the sim card is to help me judge when to swap out cards. I use two cards, one in the camera and one ready to go. Put new card in camera and transfer data from old card to USB drive. This can take up to 3-4 hours so that is why i have two cards.


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## emaja (Dec 31, 2018)

That’s the one I have too. Update the firmware and you can use 256 GB cards. 

My concern is the same as yours - what happens if I’ve deleted the video and then someone accuses me of something? I don’t want to hold onto the video forever but I also don’t want 37 hard drives lying around.


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## estore009 (Oct 14, 2017)

FLKeys said:


> My only complaint with it is I wish it had a little meter on it showing how full the sim card is to help me judge when to swap out cards.


It is easy, just tell the seller your requirements.


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## FLKeys (Dec 27, 2018)

estore009 said:


> It is easy, just tell the seller your requirements.


I have already sent a request to them, however most companies are not going to listen to one suggestion, if more people that use one contact them with the request I am pretty sure they will start working it into an upcoming firmware version. There contact information is:

[email protected]


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## PlayLoud (Jan 11, 2019)

Something I stumbled onto today. If you have a good GPU (in my case, a GTX 1080 Ti), you can use Handbrake to quite rapidly compress your dash cam footage while still maintaining acceptable quality should you ever have to defend against an accusation. I took a 5 minute interior nighttime clip (Vantrue N2 Pro), which is normally 500MB. Used Handbrake to compress it to H.265 (NVENC). The final size (after playing with settings) was about 66MB. I was happy with the quality at that size. You can of course play around with it and make the files even smaller with acceptable quality.

The real shock was how fast NVENC was able to encode it. I was getting about 335 fps, or about 11x real time. This would allow me to batch all my dash cam footage in a matter of days.

With about 20TB (out of 40TB) free on my unRAID server, I don't yet need to do this (only 3.2 TB of combined interior/exterior footage). But I would encourage everybody who is able to keep their dash cam footage for as long as possible. With this kind of compression, you can hold a LOT of footage without spending a lot of money on HDDs.


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## Moving_Target (May 6, 2019)

I just livestream to YouTube. They have much more storage space then I do!


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## EphLux (Aug 10, 2018)

Just set your Vantrue N2 Pro LCD display to ALLWAYS ON. Passengers will clearly see they are being recorded and much much less likely to file false complaint.


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## PlayLoud (Jan 11, 2019)

Moving_Target said:


> I just livestream to YouTube. They have much more storage space then I do!


I don't have unlimited data. Also, reception isn't reliable enough for that (at least not here). Finally, my dash cam doesn't do that.

But, not a bad idea if it works for you. If I ever had a pax that threatened me and/or demanded I give him/her my camera, I would SAY it is livestreaming.


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## Moving_Target (May 6, 2019)

PlayLoud said:


> I don't have unlimited data. Also, reception isn't reliable enough for that (at least not here). Finally, my dash cam doesn't do that.
> 
> But, not a bad idea if it works for you. If I ever had a pax that threatened me and/or demanded I give him/her my camera, I would SAY it is livestreaming.


Yea, it really works well for me. Is it 100% spot on, like it was a produced video?....no, it isn't. However it is 100% better than having nothing. I also record my screen, and store that by upload to YouTube as well. It's probably overkill, and I've never HAD to use the footage but I'm a safe vs. sorry kinda guy.

My cameras (BlackVue 900S) have a WiFi symbol that's illuminated on the left side of the camera....I have on a few occasions pointed that out to riders and mentioning that they were being live streamed to a private server.


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## Pflugerite (Sep 13, 2019)

EphLux said:


> Just set your Vantrue N2 Pro LCD display to ALLWAYS ON. Passengers will clearly see they are being recorded and much much less likely to file false complaint.


EXCELLENT IDEA - THIS IS A REAL GOLD NUGGET!!!!!!!


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## Trafficat (Dec 19, 2016)

I hold onto dashcam video forever. I record at very low resolution so I can store a lot of it. I ran out of harddrive space so I bought an external hard drive to store more.



> Uber support told me that pax only have two weeks to submit feedback or file a claim. For some reason, I doubt that...


Incorrect. A driver has only two weeks to submit a fare adjustment complaint, but apparently pax have no time limit. I had a fare from July refunded this month (September).

Furthermore on the pax app, you can go back in time months or longer to rerate drivers.


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## CarpeNoctem (Sep 12, 2018)

I can't say I will keep it forever but I don't plan on deleting any.

I'm a bit of a pack rat that way. I still have files from the 90's. I would have files from the 80's if I was able to transfer my Commodore files.


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