Introduction to Ring Doorbells
The Ring Video Doorbell, introduced in 2014, was one of the earliest smart doorbell models in the market. But what even is a smart doorbell, and how far back does the Ring doorbell history go?
Simply put, a smart doorbell notifies the arrival of visitors on the homeowner’s phone. The notification pops up when the visitor presses the doorbell or, in some cases, when the doorbell’s motion detector senses a presence near the door.
Smart doorbells enhance your home’s security level, ensuring you always know who’s at your door. And while today you can find a ton of smart doorbells to buy, the Ring Video Doorbell is considered one of the best, even by the New York Times.
The three factors that set the Ring Doorbell Camera apart from other competitors in the market are excellent motion detection, advanced video quality, and superb connectivity. These three things together ensure that you never have to worry about the safety of your front door again.
The Ring app will let you answer your door from anywhere, whether you’re at home or not, but we’ll delve more into this topic further down in the article!
The best part about buying a Ring Video Doorbell is all the accessories you can add to your package. Things like HD spotlight cameras and sirens for suspicious activities will help you strengthen your home security system even further, making sure you never have trouble with intruders.
While all of this is brilliant, people can sometimes struggle with accessing Ring video recordings, so this article will comprehensively walk you through the entire process, from start to finish.
Keep reading to find more bonus content, such as, how far back does Ring doorbell history go?
This article will serve as your one-stop guide for everything there is to know about video storage on Ring devices.
How Ring Stores Videos
Like all home security systems, live videos are a crucial and integral part of Ring’s Video Doorbells. These video recordings enable you to access and store vital data about who was at your front door, making sure you always catch any suspicious actions in play.
But how do these videos even get stored? The Ring Smart Home Device is connected to the Wi-Fi in your house, which it uses to send all its video content to the phone it’s connected to.
Once you receive the notification, you can open it to view a recording of anything that forced the motion sensor of your Ring Alarm System to get triggered. Depending on your chosen plans, you can save these videos to your phone or even upload them to the cloud.
Local or Cloud Storage?
You might be wondering whether important Ring videos get stored in your device’s local storage space or the Cloud, and the simple answer is both. Your Ring Cameras will record footage and send them to your phone.
From there, you can either download the videos on your local device and save them there, or you can acquire an advanced plan to upload the videos to cloud storage space.
While both options are possible, one may cost more than the other. However, in either case, you will get the option to download and save video footage.
Do I Need a Subscription?
The Ring Video Doorbell offers multiple monthly subscription protect plans, each with different features. You can still have a free Ring account, but without a Ring Protect Subscription, you will not be able to access several of the advanced features of Ring products.
The Ring Protect Basic Plan is $3.99 a month and allows you access to many exciting features, such as saving and sharing videos, disarming your Ring alarm digitally, and downloading up to 50 videos at once. However, the basic plan offers video recording for only one Ring device.
The Ring Protect Plus Plan retails for $10 a month and offers video recording for all Ring security cameras and doorbells at a single location. This plan also offers extended warranties on all your devices.
Lastly, the Ring Protect Pro Plan will cost you $20 a month, but it provides several advanced features on your Ring account, such as alarm cellular backup, SOS help, and other options for video storage.
Accessing Doorbell History
How far back does Ring Doorbell history go? We know that this is a question on everyone’s mind. In case of any unfortunate incident like robbery, the video recordings from your smart doorbell can come in handy.
However, how far back does the Ring Doorbell history go on your devices? The answer is that with a free plan, you will not be able to access any history. The free plan only has the live view feature, which will let you access a video as soon as it pops up.
However, with a monthly subscription, everything that your Ring cameras record will be stored for up to 180 days.
This means that if you pay a monthly fee, your Ring doorbell history can go as far back as 180 days, meaning you can access video footage from almost six months ago.
So, if you’re someone who likes to keep up with event history, Ring subscription plans can really come in handy.
Ring App
The Ring App is the crucial accessory you need to access your Ring Doorbell videos. Without a Ring Protect Subscription, you won’t be able to save any of your Ring Doorbell recordings, but you will still be able to access the live feed.
The live feed on your Ring account can be accessed by account owners and any shared Ring users. The app also comes with a two-way talk feature.
With two-way talk, you can speak with whoever is at the door, without physically needing to be there. You can use the app to activate the lights and the siren as well. The app works on the principle of real-time motion detection.
There are also ways to connect your Ring account with Alexa in order to enable more smart home features.
The Ring app also comes with several exclusive features not available on the website, such as Snapshot Capture. You can activate this feature from ‘device settings’ in your app and also set your own desired snapshot frequency time.
Can I Save Videos Without a Subscription?
As noted before, you need a Ring Protect Plan in order to save videos; however, there are some workaround device settings that let you save videos without paying a monthly fee.
The first way to do so is by installing screen recording software. Whenever you get motion notifications, just turn on your screen recording app, record the video as it plays, and save it to your mobile device.
Another way to use this method is to download screen recording software on your laptop. Some desktop software may come with 24-hour recording services, which will ensure you don’t miss a single beat.
If you’ve bought a new Ring Doorbell device, you will have the option to use the 30-day free trial period. In the 30-day free trial period, you will get access to all the features of a Ring Protect Plan without paying a single penny. This means that for 30 days, you can save the videos to your mobile device without any subscription.
There are other more technical methods as well, which may require you to do things like write code to record every time the doorbell rings.
If accessing Ring Doorbell videos at a later time is super important for you, then you can use any of these methods to make sure you never miss anything that the motion sensor picks up.
Recovering Deleted Ring Videos
Sometimes, you may forget to save your videos to local storage; other times, you’ll just find them lost on their own. Even though Ring is one of the best video doorbells on the market, it can struggle with technical difficulties sometimes.
If you have an issue about deleted videos, this is how you can recover your event video history.
There are two ways to store your Ring recorded videos. With a subscription, the history is available on Ring’s servers for up to 180 days, but you also have the option to download the videos.
However, Ring uses advanced encryption standards to encrypt its saved videos. While this means a high level of protection, these advanced encryption standards also mean that once these videos are deleted from Ring servers, there is no way to retrieve them. Even the police won’t be able to do anything about this!
The only event video history that you can restore is that which has been downloaded to any of your devices at least once.
In that scenario, Ring users have the option to use a video recovery service to restore their videos.
This is why we always recommend having some form of local backup for your Ring videos, which would be helpful to turn to in situations of accidental deletion.
There is no other way of Ring video recovery, which means that without downloading, once your video list is gone, it’s gone forever.
Conclusion
In this article, we have covered all the essential aspects of using a Ring doorbell. You now know how to recover deleted Ring videos, what the snapshot capture feature is, and the answer to how far back Ring doorbell history goes.
If you come up with any other problems in your Ring device settings, you always have the option to reach out to the company’s customer support service, which will be more than happy to help you out.
Life can become much more convenient with a smart doorbell like Ring; just make sure you’re using it correctly!
Farah Jassawalla is a technology enthusiast with a keen interest in AI, ML, and anything digital. Her passion for technology extends into her work as she currently manages the blog and social media for one of Canada’s most awarded tech and IT companies, in addition to consulting and writing for other brands. She’s an avid reader, writer, and researcher who is always looking out for the next big update in the digital world.
