How do camera recordings work?

[MYLRinOrange]

Yesterday when I came out of the restaurant I was at for lunch, I noticed there was an accident on the street. My Model Y was untouched, but I noticed it had a clear view of the intersection where the accident happened.

When I got in the car, there was no sentry event alert. I opened up the recordings viewer and it let me watch the sentry mode recording from the time I was in the restaurant, and sure enough about halfway through it caught the accident.

Today, a little less than 24 hours later, I pulled out the drive and loaded it into my computer to see if I could grab the footage, and it's no longer there in any of the folders (RecentClips, SavedClips, SentryClips).

1. Is there anything I could/should have done in the car at the time to save the sentry recording?
2. Is there anything I can do with the car now to have it always save all recordings? I keep reading that the car will only keep the last hour or so of footage if it isn't manually saved either by honking the horn or tapping the camera icon.
3. I'm tempted to set up the Raspberry Pi Tesla USB, but I'm unclear if this will record all footage or not.

 

[jjrandorin]

It works the way it is explained in this sticky thread here:

Dashcam / Sentry: How they work and what they do (and dont) do

(moderator note) Special thanks to @Knightshade , for taking the time to write up a description of how Sentry and Dashcam interact together. There is a lot of confusion about these two features, and how they interact together. I asked @Knightshade who has a good understanding of how these...

teslamotorsclub.com

 

[MYLRinOrange]

It works the way it is explained in this sticky thread here:

Dashcam / Sentry: How they work and what they do (and dont) do

(moderator note) Special thanks to @Knightshade , for taking the time to write up a description of how Sentry and Dashcam interact together. There is a lot of confusion about these two features, and how they interact together. I asked @Knightshade who has a good understanding of how these...

teslamotorsclub.com

Thanks for the link. So I read through this thread, and it basically sounds like I was SOL if the accident happened more than 10 minutes before I got back to the car (which it did). It sounds like there were only two ways to get the footage:

1. Yank the USB drive out so that the recording in the recent folder would not be overwritten.
2. Record the footage on the screen with my smartphone.

Is this accurate?

 

[jcanoe]

Dash cam records continuously while you drive. The clips are 10 minutes in length and overwritten after 1 hour (unless you save the clip by honking the horn or tapping the screen or if the Tesla vehicle detects that there may have been a collision.)

Sentry mode records when you park. Sentry mode clips are not saved unless the Tesla vehicle detects a Sentry mode event. What you viewed was probably the current Sentry mode video clip (not saved because the accident did not happen close enough to your Tesla vehicle to trigger a Sentry mode event.)

You can delete saved Sentry mode recordings but you can't delete the current video file while Sentry mode is actively recording. Tesla may have added a Save option while viewing the Sentry mode current video. Whenever there is a Sentry mode event the recording would be automatically saved.

 

[stopcrazypp]

Thanks for the link. So I read through this thread, and it basically sounds like I was SOL if the accident happened more than 10 minutes before I got back to the car (which it did). It sounds like there were only two ways to get the footage:

1. Yank the USB drive out so that the recording in the recent folder would not be overwritten.
2. Record the footage on the screen with my smartphone.

Is this accurate?

The RecentClips folder actually records 1 minute clips that are deleted after a hour is past.

There are more options:
3. Pause dashcam (dot on icon will turn gray)
Model Y Owner's Manual | Tesla
4. Assuming your drive had enough free space such that the deleted files weren't overwritten yet, recover the footage deleted from RecentClips using a file recovery tool like Recuva:
Dashcam in Auto

Yanking the drive however is the safest. I suggest keeping a spare drive in the glovebox at all times, so you can swap in if you have to do so. Given I am using a High Endurance microSD card with a reader, I just use the drive Tesla provided as the spare.