Joel Taylor

Something happened on the road — an accident, a hit-and-run, a parking-lot scrape, someone behaving dangerously — and you went to pull the clip off your dash cam, only to find it isn’t there, or the camera is throwing a…

Your Amcrest recorder isn’t recording, and when you check the settings it says “NO DISK.” Maybe the live view shows it; maybe you found out only when you went looking for a clip that should have been there. The good…

Your Swann recorder is showing “No HDD detected” or “No hard drive found,” the live screen has a red square instead of recording, or playback comes back empty — and the footage you need isn’t there. For a home or…

Your Lorex system stopped recording. The screen says “HDD is not available for recording,” or “No Disk,” or “Hard Drive is not detected” — often right after a power flicker — and the footage you went looking for isn’t there.…

Your Dahua recorder — or a Lorex or Amcrest unit, which are built on the same Dahua platform — is showing “No Disk,” an HDD error, or an “Unformatted” status, and the playback timeline that should hold weeks of footage…

Your Hikvision recorder is beeping, the screen shows an HDD Error, and the playback timeline that should hold weeks of footage is empty. Or you pulled the drive, connected it to a PC, and Windows says it needs to be…

There are two versions of this bad day. In one, you finish a shoot on an URSA or Pocket Cinema Camera, drop the card in your machine, and half of your BRAW clips show black thumbnails and won’t open in…

It is the call no production company wants to make. You were paid well to cover a concert, a conference keynote, a once-only live event — multiple cameras, a long continuous record, no second takes. The show ends, someone kills…