HDA30 Series: DVR Playbacks Issues

Similar Issues

• System is not recording
• Hard drive is not formatted
• Hard drive is not detected
• Hard drive is full
• Playbacks cannot be found
• PIR Systems is recording not important events

Note: DVR recordings are saved in the Hard Drive of your DVR. The first thing you must check is if the Hard Drive is working properly.

Troubleshooting Steps

1. Pre-Installed HDD
Verify your system specs if your DVR has a pre-installed Hard Drive. Some models are sold with no Hard Drive installed and customers must install it. For help installing the HDD, follow this link  Installing or Upgrading the HDD

2. Hard Drive Status
If your DVR has a pre-installed Hard Drive, please, check if it has been detected, is formatted and still has free space to save recordings.
To check the HDD Status, please refer to HDA30 Series: Hard Drive Issues

3. Record Schedule
If you have already checked that your Hard Drive is working fine but you are still having problems with Playbacks, you need to check the Record Schedule. By default, DVR is set up to record 24/7 when motion is detected, but if this feature has been changed, the DVR will probably not record in specific days and hours. Check the DVR Record Schedule to make sure is set up as desired for each individual channel.

3.1. For HDA30 Series DVR:
• Go to DVR Main Menu (You may need to log in after this step)
• Click on Record Tab
• On the left menu list, select Settings sub-tab
• Once on Settings sub-tab, select Record Schedule
Yellows squares represent Motion Record and Green squares represent Normal Record (continuous). If no squares are selected for determinate days and hours, the DVR will not record at this time.

4. Playbacks Time
If you have already checked that your Hard Drive is working fine and Record Schedule is configured as desired, but you are still having problems to find recordings, you maybe have issues with the Playback Time.

For example, if you are pretty sure that an event (ex: motion detection) has occurred at a specific time, but at this time there is nothing recorded in your DVR. For this case, the problem could be that the DVR date and time is different or not synchronized with the local time. That is why Playback time is different from the time selected on DVR recording Search.
To learn how to solve this issue, please go to HDA30 Series: Date and Time issues

Another problem with playback time occurs when you try to find old recordings if the date you are looking for is before the oldest date on recordings, it indicates that to keep recording new events, the file you are looking for has been overwritten.

5. Camera PIR sensor
If you are having problems with playbacks of a specific channel and this channel has connected a PIR camera, you must ensure the PIR feature of the camera is working properly. Recordings on PIR cameras not only depends on Motion, it also depends on PIR detection. For this case, please, go to Analog Cameras: PIR Detection Issues