Ring doorbells and security cameras have become very popular in recent years. That’s thanks to their unmatched security and reliable surveillance service that allows you to see what’s happening near your home in real-time. This company has helped millions of people catch thieves, report drunk drivers, discover stalkers, and track activities in the vicinity. Unfortunately, some owners accidentally delete their Ring videos and have no idea how to get them back. In this article, we will demonstrate how to recover deleted Ring videos and protect them from being wiped out. Without a delay, let’s dive in.
Why do People Lose Their Ring Videos?
Let’s start with the good news. It’s very rare for the Ring doorbell and security camera owners to experience any kind of video loss. Even if they do, it happens mostly because of mistaken deletion or if the Ring videos aren’t downloaded within a fixed period of time. Let’s take a look at the two most common reasons for Ring video loss:
Accidental Deletion
It takes a few simple clicks or taps to wipe out any video from the Ring app or their web interface. It’s quite common for people to delete the Ring videos they don’t need. But what if you select the wrong video while mass deleting your app data? Well, now you experience endless frustration without our help.
Automatic Video Removal
Ring keeps your videos safe in their cloud storage for up to 180 days. After the 180 days pass, Ring will automatically remove the videos from its server. The only way to keep the videos longer is to download them on your phone or PC. If you forget to download your Ring videos during that period, you can’t find them anymore. Losing a video that you wanted to keep safe is a pretty unpleasant experience that often happens to new Ring security users. But don’t worry! We will explain how to recover the deleted Ring videos later in this article.
When Is It Possible to Recover Deleted Ring Videos?
People take matters related to their privacy seriously, and Ring is aware. Thus, to protect its users’ privacy, Ring removes every video older than 180 days from its servers. The company uses a combination of TLS (Transport Layer Security) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption to encrypt your videos. Hence, once Ring erases a video from their server, it’s pretty much gone permanently. Usually, there’s no way to restore them anymore.
Consequently, the only Ring videos you can recover are the local videos you have personally deleted from your Ring app or the downloaded Ring videos that are now lost from your mobile or computer. In short, you can still restore the videos that you have accidentally deleted. However, if the video has been wiped out from the Ring server after 180 days of its recording, you can consider it gone.
Can Police Get Access to My Erased Ring Videos?
According to Ring’s privacy policy, they only share the videos if the government agencies request to provide data by complying with the state laws following proper legal proceedings. They can also help if the government needs the videos as a piece of evidence for death or serious injury cases. However, even the police or other government agencies cannot restore the Ring videos that have already been deleted from the company’s server.
Recover the Deleted Local Ring Videos Using Data Recovery Software
If you have accidentally deleted a downloaded Ring video, you can easily restore it using a professional data recovery application. While there are many data recovery apps available in the market today, you should only choose the apps that fulfill the following conditions:
- The application is offered by a renowned data recovery company.
- The data recovery application has plenty of positive reviews both from the end users and data recovery experts.
As long as the data recovery app of your choice meets these two conditions, download it on your computer and follow these instructions to recover the deleted Ring videos:
- Open the data recovery application on your PC. If the Ring video has been deleted from a mobile device, connect it to your computer before launching the data recovery app.
- Now, from the list of storage devices and drives, select the drive or folder that contained the Ring video before its deletion. If the video has been deleted from your mobile device, select the mobile instead.
- Next, click on the “Search for lost data” or “Scan” option to start the scanning process.
- Once the scan is complete, you will be able to review all the recoverable files extracted from the folder or drive. Here, select the Ring videos you want to restore and click on the “Recover” button.
- Pick a folder to download the selected videos and click on the “OK” button. Ring videos will be transferred to the chosen folder and thus recovered.
Things You Must Know About the Ring Web Interface
Ring encourages its customers to use the Ring mobile app to manage and view the video recordings. But it also provides an amazing web interface that you can access via any modern browser, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. The only problem with the web version is that it makes accidental deletion of Ring videos way too easy. If you lose your focus once, you might end up deleting the wrong video.
In the web interface of Ring, it won’t even give you a chance to second guess your decision to delete the videos. Just one click on the delete option, and you can say goodbye to your video forever. The only way to recover the videos deleted from the Ring web interface is to have a local backup of the video. Well, the same rule applies to the Ring mobile app too. If by chance you lose the local backup, you can use the previous method to retrieve it.
Bonus Tip: Protecting Your Ring Videos from Being Deleted
If you want to protect your Ring videos from unexpected accidents, you should download them and save them in a local backup drive on a regular basis. You should use the Ring web interface to download the videos as it permits downloading up to 50 video files at once. Here’s how you can download the Ring videos on your computer using the web interface:
- Go to the official sign-in page of Ring via your browser and sign in using your Ring credentials.
- Click the “History” tab.
- Proceed by clicking the “Manage” option and selecting the videos you want to download.
- Click on the “Download” option and enter the Ring password to start the downloading process.
As a precaution, you should never delete any Ring video. Any video that exceeds 180 days after recording will be automatically deleted from the company server. Ergo, you don’t need to delete old videos manually.
