I have an Arlo base station (VMB4000R3) and 4 Arlo cameras. When I bought it, it was free to record and view videos via cloud. That changed last year when it became $3/month (introductory offer). Now it’s a ridiculous $14/month.
Is there a way around this? Or is my best bet to sell this and get something else?
I need a wireless solution .
I have a M365 Developer account. I rarely use it because i am afraid it may expire and not getting renewed. Does the account goes forever as long your subscribed?
As long as they can see there's some level of "activity" happening in your M365 tenant, then they will just keep renewing it. You need to use it, otherwise they'll just expire it if there's no activity.
I use it to store my backups of my phone, PC, etc. Obviously don't use it as the only source of backup. Since the backups are usually large in size, it's good enough to register as "activity". I recommend using FolderSync, it is fantastic and super easy to use. It uses MSGraph API calls to talk to the backend and the throttle limit for me is about 4 MB/s. A 100GB file will prob take about 8 hours to upload for me, which is fine as I just leave it overnight.
I have 2 M365 Dev accounts and they've been going strong for months.
The other thing you should really think about is what type of files are suitable on a cloud backup. Do you really care if a security recording from 3 weeks ago gets wiped? If you need to save the recording for whatever reason, you should just download it ASAP. If someone robbed my house today, first thing I'll do is to view the footage and send it to the police. At this point, the footage would have been downloaded to my phone or to my PC. And it's not like you should store your security footages purely in the cloud. It should store locally onto a microSD, or onto your NAS and then you upload it to the cloud.
As far as I know, there are no security camera solutions out there that upload directly to a private cloud. They provide their own cloud storage as a subscription and it's against their business to introduce free options to consumers. So most of these solutions require you to set up automation to upload from a homebase or NAS to your own cloud, which means you would have had at least 2 copies of the same footage anyway.
@NovaAlpha thanks for that detailed explanation. I might hit you up (by comments ) for some more info or help. Thanks heaps.
When you say wireless, can it be powered or needs to be battery operated only?
Both ideally. cheaper so that I can do it myself than get a certified Electrician to do it .
Most wired residential cameras just run on 12v (low voltage) so you should never need an electrician to install them. Instead all you do is plug them into the nearest outlet and run a long 12v cable to where ever the camera is to go.
Most wired residential cameras just run on 12v (low voltage) so you should never need an electrician to install them. Instead all you do is plug them into the nearest outlet and run a long 12v cable to where ever the camera is to go.
I suspect the same thing is true with anything requiring a mains connection? If you run an extension lead from an existing socket to where you need it, I can't see why you'd need an electrician to do it for you?
Some of them don't even need 12v rather they run on 5v1a which you can easily pass along with a conduit
Im on Arlo Pro 2 and still on free 7 day cloud storage until End of Useful Life (whenever that is). No issues for me and ive owned for several years.
These are still an "OK" camera. Has a fairly good resale value due to the free cloud storage. I'm finding the batteries are starting to fail or have degraded significantly now though. Tech has moved on quite a bit in regards to performance and resolution. The current eufy equivalent offers colour nightvision. 4K resolution. AI detection (pet, person, vehicle, and can even tell you who it is) easy or inbuilt solar for true wireless. Some models have 360 auto pan and tilt, 24/7 recording etc etc.
@kiwical and do those features work without subscription (i.e the AI detection) ?
Yes. I have few different Eufy cams and everything works without any subscriptions. It has local storage either on camera or homebase depending on camera.
@ace310: @ace310, thanks . Can you also access the local storage remotely?
Any downsides to it ?
With Arlo, there are often lag issues and often times when its inaccessible - the app and cameras.
@RJA7: No issues from outside as well. Just takes couple of secs but all works fine. I also use 2 way talking sometimes,
I have both wired & battery operated with solar panel. Never really have bothered recharging any of them except for the e340 doorbell which is just battery operated.
@L3tstaxth1s I should have explained, I have 2 of those that still have the 7 day storage ( didn't read my email properly , I thought that would end ….apparently not) and I have 2 newer ones that are useless without the subscription.
Been using the Tapo c420 cameras by TP link. Has a base station with removable SD card which I can view remotely. Has been working well for me. No subscription required.
Have had to replace one camera under warranty, got it from Noel leeming and it was an easy exchange.
@magicmarker .. oooh its currently 343 for 2 cameras and the hub. SO you can view the local storage remotely ? Also have you had issues with the lag AND any times when it has not detected ?
Yup can view it remotely. There have been times in the morning when it’s below 0deg and the PIR sensor becomes less sensitive and has missed a few instances. The notifications come by pretty quick.
+1 for Tapo cameras. They are made by TP-Link and work well with good support and are reasonably priced. I access mine via RTSP back to my home server running Frigate so no sub required…
Don't buy Arlo, their products are always running into performance issues of some sort. Just check their official forum and look at all the user complaints.
Most companies don't offer free cloud storage, as it's just not economical for them to do so. You're better off getting a Eufy and record to base station, then back up your recorded footage to your own cloud using automation. I use GoodSync and FolderSync to sync my NAS to my OneDrive. I have a 25TB storage for free because I have a M365 Developer account (which I also got for free as well). There used to be a way to get this free but it's not available anymore, but luckily I got to keep my account. Regardless, you can buy your own cloud storage and use whatever methods to sync your data. Both GoodSync and FolderSync are great imo, but there are other options out there.
Eufy does also offer a cloud subscription, but I've never used it and in fact, never used any of the subscriptions because I'm cheap. I think their subscription is pretty reasonable, around $10 for 10 cameras I believe, which is pretty good compared to other ones like Wyze (1 sub per camera). Although someone just posted this on Reddit a few hours ago, but 1080p is still good imo - https://www.reddit.com/r/EufyCam/comments/1djvccl/psa_eufy_c…
I used to recommend Wyze but it's a bit MEH nowadays. They recently released WyzeCam v4 and it was on sale. If you get it shipped here using NZ Youshop, would probably cost you a total of maybe around $70~$80? The v4 is 2.5K I believe and the starlight sensor is great for night time recording, as it shows everything in clear colour. It's actually pretty amazing. Apart from Wyze, I think only Eufy also has the starlight sensor in some of their models. WyzeCams (except v3 Pro) comes with free cloud storage and it's rolling storage of about 2 weeks. But you can only record in 5 minute intervals and the recording is 12s long. So assuming someone shows up at your front door at 12pm, it'll record somewhere between 12:00:00 pm ~ 12:00:12 pm and then there's about a 5 minute wait interval. If they break into your house during that time, there's no footage recorded. You can however add a microSD to it, but then again you can do this with most cameras and the risk here is that the theif can just take the microSD card or the entire camera with them. One thing I do like about the Wyze cameras is that starting from I believe v3, they're designed to work both indoor and outdoor. They can easily be mounted with a magnetic plate, or securely mounted by screwing into the wall. They also offer a bunch of add-ons that you can buy, like solar panel chargers, spotlights (this comes pre-installed into the v4), etc. Can even add a lamp light at your porch to automatically turn on when Wyze cam detects motion, etc. Basically, their ecosystem and integration with other products is pretty neat. Subscription is per camera and it's not too bad either if you want to keep going down the subscription route.
Alternatively, you can set up your own motion detect and even add AI capabilities by running your own server, but this is not for beginners and takes a lot of effort and time to set it up right. Even for me, having set a lot of these up before myself, I don't really have the time to upgrade and maintain and manage them, especially since I have multiple properties to manage.
Lastly, you could re-purpose an old Android phone (or get a cheap one) and run TinyCam Pro on it, then set up automatic backup to your own cloud using FolderSync on Android, or some other apps. A while ago, I played around with setting up some spare Android phones that I had and because they have good cameras, they actually provide much better quality than some of the security cameras that I got, even though some of those are running 2K or 4K quality. I can remote onto them easily from my laptop using scrcpy (look up the tool on Github. There's a GUI for that too that you can download separately). And because of the automation that I had set up, it's very easily scalable and they automatically trigger continuous recording when I'm out of the house and disables it when I'm back home. They're just plugged in all the time to a charger. And all the footages will generate a snapshot and sent to my email and my Slack channel, as well as uploading the continuous recorded footage (in 5 min interval chunks) to my cloud. So it sort of does almost what I want in a security camera. But I only played around with this setup for fun, I still have my other cameras around the house.