Tesla Sentry Footage Missing? Why Clips Disappear.

Q: Where does Tesla actually store Sentry and Dashcam clips?

Tesla uses three separate folders inside TeslaCam/, each with different retention behaviour: RecentClips auto-rotates, SentryClips is auto-cleaned when the drive fills up, and only SavedClips is truly permanent. Deleted Sentry clips can remain on the drive until later writes replace them, so ClipSalvage can scan for what remains.

Q: What's actually recoverable?

When Tesla auto-deletes SentryClips data it is only marked as free space, not erased — the MP4 data can remain physically on the drive until later writes replace it. New recording is one such write, at a predictable rate of roughly 17 GB per hour of driving on a 6-camera AI4/HW4 car. A free ClipSalvage scan helps you judge what survives, with available previews, so you can export only the clips worth keeping.

Q: Why do Sentry events vanish more often on smaller drives?

At roughly 17 GB per hour on a 6-camera AI4/HW4 car, a 32 GB drive fills completely in under two hours of driving and starts auto-deleting immediately — so Sentry events on small drives are almost always at risk.

Q: How do I get back a Sentry event that disappeared?

Take the USB drive out of the car, scan it with ClipSalvage on a Mac or Windows PC, look at the available previews and recovery assessments of the deleted Sentry clips it finds, and export the event you need to a folder on a different drive. ClipSalvage can only recover data that is still on the drive.

Which case are you in?

Ask three things: did the car have a usable USB drive and show Recording on the Dashcam icon when the event happened, was the drive close to full, and has it been formatted or reused since?

The car never wrote the clip (no usable drive, Dashcam off, the wrong port, or a full drive that could not save): there is nothing on the drive for any software to find. Read Sentry Mode is on but nothing is recording to the USB drive — why?
The car wrote the clip and later deleted it (the drive filled up and the oldest Sentry clips were removed, or it was formatted): the data may still be on the drive. Follow the steps below.

How do I get back a Sentry event that disappeared?

Use ClipSalvage to scan the drive for the deleted event:

Take the USB drive out of the car now. Every further minute of recording can overwrite more of what was deleted.
Scan the drive with ClipSalvage on a Mac or Windows PC. The app opens it read-only.
Preview what ClipSalvage found. Available thumbnails and recovery assessments are free.
Export the event you need with ClipSalvage to a folder on a different drive, then check the exported footage.

Where does Tesla actually store Sentry and Dashcam clips?

The mental model most new Tesla owners have — "my dashcam records everything and keeps it" — isn't how it actually works. Tesla uses three separate folders inside TeslaCam/, each with different retention behaviour:

RecentClips/ — a rolling buffer of the last ~60 minutes of driving (varies by drive size). Tesla auto-deletes the oldest clips as new ones come in. This is always churning.
SentryClips/ — footage captured around Sentry Mode detection events. Preserved longer than RecentClips, but Tesla will auto-clean older SentryClips folders when the drive starts running low on space to make room for recording to continue.
SavedClips/ — footage you explicitly pressed the dashcam-save button for while driving. Preserved until you manually delete. This is the only bucket Tesla doesn't auto-clean.

If the clip you're looking for was a Sentry event that happened weeks ago on a drive that's been actively recording since, there's a real chance Tesla itself deleted the SentryClips folder to free space — not formatting, not corruption, just the car's normal housekeeping.

The event.json sidecar

Each SentryClips event folder also contains a tiny event.json file that records metadata about why the event fired:

reason — what triggered it (alarm, glass break, object detection, lean-on, honk)
camera — which camera first detected the event
timestamp — exact time of the trigger
est_lat / est_lon — approximate GPS when the event fired

This file is less than 1 KB. If a copy is still readable on the drive, it records the "why" behind each event — useful if you're compiling incident evidence for insurance or police and need to explain what the car was detecting.

What's actually recoverable?

When SentryClips data has been auto-deleted by Tesla (not secure-erased — just marked as free space by the file system), the MP4 cluster data can remain physically on the drive until later writes replace it. Because Tesla writes new RecentClips sequentially, the rate of overwriting is predictable: roughly 17 GB per hour across all six cameras on an AI4/HW4 car.

On a 128 GB drive that was running near full, a Sentry event from three days ago may have been partially overwritten by subsequent RecentClips recording. Some of its per-camera MP4s may still be intact; others may be partially overwritten (lower confidence scores, possibly playback glitches in specific segments); one or two may be entirely gone.

A free ClipSalvage scan helps you judge what survives on the drive. It shows the clips it finds with available thumbnails and recovery assessments. Scores are guidance, not proof that every frame survived. The scan does not write to the source drive.

Why do Sentry events vanish more often on smaller drives?

Older Tesla documentation suggested USB drives as small as 32 GB. At roughly 17 GB per hour, a 32 GB drive fills completely in under two hours of driving and starts auto-deleting immediately. That is a single commute, not a day of them. Sentry events on a 32 GB drive are almost always at risk.

On a 256 GB drive, you've got roughly 15 hours of driving headroom before the oldest content starts getting cycled. That's enough margin that most Sentry events survive until you next plug the drive in — unless the car has been heavily driven since the event.

Prevention — before the next incident

Press the Save button. When Tesla notifies you of a Sentry event, open the dashcam UI and tap "Save." This moves the clip from SentryClips to SavedClips, which Tesla never auto-deletes.
Use a drive with headroom. 128 GB minimum; 256 GB preferred if you drive daily. More headroom means more time to review events before they're at risk.
Two-drive rotation. Keep two USB drives. Rotate one out of the car weekly. Copy anything interesting off before putting it back in. At any moment, one drive is a snapshot.
Check periodically. Plugging the drive into a computer once a week and eyeballing SentryClips catches anything notable before it ages out.
Which software should I use to recover deleted Tesla dashcam footage?

When the Sentry event was critical

If you're trying to recover a Sentry clip for an insurance claim, police report, or legal proceeding, the sequence is:

Remove the USB drive from the Tesla now. Every minute of further driving reduces recoverability.
Run a scan to see what's still there. Free scans surface clips found by the scan — including partially-overwritten ones — with confidence scores.
Recover anything scoring above 40. Even lower-confidence clips may contain enough visible detail to identify a license plate or confirm what happened.

A recovered clip the app does not mark Repaired is a byte-for-byte copy of what Tesla originally wrote. A clip marked Repaired is a rebuilt MP4: the video frames are Tesla's, but its index was rebuilt and footage near the end may be missing. Available confidence scores assess structural integrity to help select footage to export and check. They do not establish authenticity, evidentiary integrity or acceptance by an insurer or police. Say which clips were repaired, check the exported footage, and keep the drive or a disk image of it as the original evidence.

Takeaway

"Tesla said there was an event, but the clip isn't there" usually doesn't mean corruption — it means Tesla's normal folder-rotation did what it was designed to do. The good news: if it was deleted recently and you stop using the drive, the data may still be on it, and ClipSalvage can scan the drive and recover what it finds.

Sources & references

Tesla owner's manual — Dashcam & Sentry Mode storage (RecentClips / SentryClips / SavedClips retention)
Tesla support — Dashcam & Sentry Mode (event-triggering behaviour, storage limits)
Microsoft exFAT specification (deletion-flag mechanics)

What if your clips are encrypted?

On supported cars — those with the AMD Ryzen infotainment computer — new Dashcam and Sentry clips on the USB drive are encrypted by default, since Tesla software 2026.20. An encrypted clip is not an ordinary MP4: carving it back off the drive recovers the data, but the file will not play until it is also decrypted. ClipSalvage does both in one pass — it carves the encrypted containers out of unallocated space and decrypts them into playable MP4s, so a deleted or formatted drive is not a dead end. Doing that across a whole drive at once is covered in the guide to decrypting encrypted Tesla clips.

Clips recorded before the update, clips recorded with Controls > Safety > Encrypt Dashcam Recordings switched off, and clips from cars without the feature (older Intel-based cars, and vehicles in mainland China, where Tesla has not enabled it) are ordinary MP4 files, and everything on this page applies to them unchanged. Full detail: Tesla dashcam encryption: what it means for recovery.

Recover deleted Tesla Sentry footage

Why Tesla Sentry Mode events go missing from the USB drive