eufy security Floodlight Camera, 2K, No Monthly Fees, 2000 Lumens, Weatherproof - £99.98 @ Sold by AnkerDirect Dispatches from Amazon

I've previously been very evangelical about Anker gear and these very same Eufy Flooglight Cameras.

I've had two installed for about 14 months and apart from issues tweaking sensitivity (my fault for having one high up on the house, exactly where you'd want a drive light (a direct replacement for a straight up drive light) but right in the path of a boiler vent in the ground floor) they've been solid and not much need for them.

A week ago one of them captured the early hours arrival of my neighbours online milk delivery service sending an unfamiliar driver who went up and down four front driveways about three times each looking for the neighbours address, then reversed his truck into the neighbours car doing a ton of damage, and then spent ten minutes on the mobile phone getting coached in how to make his visit "disappear" like he was never there, including taking the neighbours delivery back again so they could pretend someone forgot their delivery.

The neighbour had no idea what had happened to her car or her milk, so I said I'd check my drive cam. And sure enough it had multiple clips over quarter of an hour showing the bizarre sequence of various incriminating events.

And while I was in the middle of viewing these and figuring out how to download them the Eufy app (latest version, Android) hung a spinning progress wheel over the video claiming it was "decrypting from local source" before eventually crashing back to restart the app, and when the app came back up either camera or app has deleted almost all (save for inexplicable random clusters) record in the index of clips prior to a couple of hours before the time of my access.

The storage is still full of clips. but the database index of them is gone.

Vapour.

My neighbour is gutted and can't get either the milk provider or the insurance company to pursue a claim for damage without video evidence. Diplomatic incident! I've put it in writing anyway, for what it's worth.

An abundance of similar inopportune disappearances of video clips have been reported on t'web. With an apparent cluster anecdotally reporting that this phenomenon coincides or worsens with a new build of app originating early this year.

Eufy support have responded to a complaint made via their app and to be fair I'm currently getting one email per day first thing in the morning.

After five days of acknowledgement of the problem - and "interest" in what happened - the answers unfortunately are unhelpful. At first I was told that due to finite storage, "when full" the camera recycles storage space, deleting old files. Indeed... but deleting yesterday's files is a ridiculous failure of problem.

Eufy cannot log into the camera to recover files. They're encrypted and the local machine is part of the key.

There's no way to crack open the light and read the internal SD card. It's encrypted.

The camera is out of warranty and in credit to Eufy they've proposed to replace it with an unwarrantied unit to see if that changes anything, with an implied committment to try to improve firmware/app.

But regrettably no means of fixing the lost footage.

Another credit to Eufy...

On forums there was a lot of speculation that this flaw is "allowed" in order to drive users to the cloud storage subscription.

Eufy didn't try to sell that idea at all. No mention of cloud. I asked them if the Homebase 3 product would solve the question of random losses of onboard clips and I was simply advised that compatibility with the Floodlight Cam was not due till late in the year.

So... YMMV.

Perhaps newer manufactured units of this product have a greater stability I don't know about. Eufy are certainly keen to send me one to try a switcheroo.

As I've told them, a lot of quirks and flaws can be forgiven. The inexplicable random deletion of your most recent clips is an absolutely mission critical flaw.

Are reviews high in general because this flaw is rare, or because you only discover it on the rare occasion you needed your footage?

When you say no monthly cost. Does is it meen I dont have to pay to get footage when I'm out of the house or 5 miles away from the camera?

Eufy stuff is alright but I’ve had problems.

>>Doorbell camera not picking people up during the day and at night

>> Often picks up motion outside of the zone I’ve set. 

>> Cam 2C every now and then disconnects and then Homebase doesn’t pick it up at all. 

>> One of my entry sensors has stopped working altogether. 

>> Quite often takes ages when connecting to cameras and miss people at the door. And often get an error connecting altogether. Fine on wifi but mobile connection very poor. And I’ve been with different networks and had different phones and still the same outcome. 


A lot of work to be done on eufys end. (edited)

iam having several problems with the sensitivity of this camera despite setting it multiple times.