ROOKIE mistake, and I should have known better!

[DashcamDPR]

Out for a drive this eve and two bellends overtake me to shoot through a red light on the wrong side of the road, front dashcam catches it fine so I figure I'll get the rear footage to see if I have the numberplates visible from before they started to overtake, BUT...

My car has been off the road for a week and I forgot the cams would most likely have forgotten the date and time settings (front has GPS so its fine, sets itself). The card in the rear cam was full with files from last week and had it not forgotten the settings it'd have just carried on as normal, but it's labelled the first file from today as 2011/01/01, as a result, my 2 hour drive consisted of the dashcam overwriting that one single file over and over because all the other files on the card were 2017/10/xx from last week and before!!!!

Lesson learned! I've formatted the card and I need to reset the date and time on my rear cam tomorrow!

 

[DT MI]

GPS on all my cams just for that reason.

 

[Rajagra]

Ouch, that's worrying. I have to say it's a bit of a design flaw though, definitely a rough edge that should not exist in this kind of product.
On bootup the camera could scan the card for the latest date/time and ensure the clock is set to at least that time.

 

[SawMaster]

I always keep in mind that my dashcams are very basic devices that require more than the usual user-supervision They just don't have the processing power to do all of their own thinking so you have to provide the missing parts yourself 3 out of 5 of my current cams do not keep time terribly well and I have to adjust them manually every couple weeks. And I don't have any way to do settings in my WR-1 yet so it's time setting is useless but it still records well

Phil

 

[DashcamDPR]

On bootup the camera could scan the card for the latest date/time and ensure the clock is set to at least that time.

that'd be an excellent feature if it's do-able but in all honesty it was absolutely my own fault, it was unused for 8 days and is 2 years old, it isn't holding much charge when switched on without being plugged in, realistically I should have expected it to have reverted back to factory time settings. fortunately it was only the two racing idiots that the cam missed, and the front cam had worthy footage