Nest Cam Indoor Wired 2nd Gen - can't view events unless camera is plugged in

[Mark_Waterloo]

I have several Nest Cams (indoor, wired, 2nd gen) and I'm using the Home app on my Google Pixel 4XL phone. I also signed up for the 30 day free trial of Nest Aware. I used the cameras while I was away and unplugged them after my return. When I look at the event history for each camera on the Home app, I can see thumbnails of the video recording for each event (with a few frames of the recording playing in a loop within the thumbnail), but I cannot view the actual event recording (ie. when I click on the thumbnail, a window opens with the first frame of the video showing and an animated loading icon (also called a throbber or spinning wheel) runs perpetually. If I plug in the camera, I am able to retrieve/view the full recording (regardless of whether the camera is turned on).  Is this normal? I believe the Nest Aware service is cloud-based and so I wouldn't have thought that retrieval of a recorded event would depend on the physical camera in any way. If this is normal operating behaviour, then it would seem that all event recordings would be lost if the camera is stolen or damaged - is this correct?

[RenzJ]

Hi Mark_Waterloo,

Thanks for posting here in the Google Nest Community. Let's check this out. Based on your description, the camera reacted like there was a power outage since you unplugged the device. Nest Cam will automatically store up to one hour of recorded events in its local memory. When things are up and running again, you’ll be able to see exactly what happened. Yes, it is working as intended.

If you have other questions, keep us posted. We're happy to help.

Cheers,

Renz

[Mark_Waterloo]

Thanks for the response. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the Google Nest Indoor Wired camera only stores video locally even if you have a Nest Aware subscription. That is consistent with my experience, but I am still confused by Google's marketing and support claims since I just read a claim on the Google support site (and elsewhere) that video is automatically uploaded to the cloud (if you have a Nest Aware subscription).

Here is the link to the support article:

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9225631?hl=en#:~:text=If%20you're%20a%20Nest,tablet%20o....

I had a 30-day trial subscription of Nest Aware, but I couldn't retrieve the event videos from the cloud. I could only retrieve the videos while the camera was plugged in, which I assume means the videos were (only) stored locally on the camera and not in the cloud.

[RenzJ]

Hello Mark_Waterloo,

Sorry for the confusion. The video recordings are stored in the cloud if you have a Nest aware subscription, but what happened in your case is that since you unplugged the device, the Nest Cam stored up to one hour of recorded events on its local memory and acted like there was a power outage, and when you plugged it back in, it restored all of the recordings from the cloud.

Since the video recordings are cloud-based, it is required for the Nest Cam to have power or be plugged in for you to be able to create clips or download video recordings. You can download the video recording anywhere using the Google Home app.

Let us know if that helps.

Regards,

Renz