Something hit your parked car. Here's how to find the clip.

A guide for Tesla owners with Sentry Mode footage on the USB drive. Updated September 2026.

If Sentry Mode was on, the car almost certainly recorded it. The footage is on the USB drive in the car, saved as a folder of short videos, one per camera, covering the ten minutes before the car noticed something. This page walks through where that folder is, the fastest way to find the right minute, what to do if the clips are encrypted, and what to hand over for a claim.

1. Where the clip is

On most cars built since 2020 the drive is in the glovebox. Older cars use the USB ports in the center console. Plug it into your Mac and open it in Finder. You're looking for this:

• TeslaCam/SentryClips/ holds every Sentry event, one folder each.
• Each folder is named for the car's local date and time when it saved the event, for example 2026-09-08_21-33-05.
• Inside are roughly ten one-minute videos per camera: front, back, left_repeater, right_repeater, and on newer cars the two pillar cameras.
• The moment that triggered the save is near the end of that window, usually in the last minute or two, not the start.

Two things trip people up. The times are the car's local time with no time zone, so a trip across a border shows up as a jump. And the folder time is when the car saved the event, which is a few seconds after the trigger, so look at the folder whose time is just after the incident, not just before.

2. Three ways to watch it

On the car's screen

Tap the camera icon while parked. Fine for one clip you already know the time of. Slow if you have to hunt through a week of events, and you're sitting in the car doing it.

In the Tesla app

The app's Security section can stream and save clips from the drive while the car is online. It needs a Premium Connectivity subscription or the car on Wi-Fi, and it plays one clip at a time.

On your Mac

Plug the drive in. Curbwatch lists every event on the drive newest first, opens each one at the trigger with all cameras on one timeline, and plots them on a map so the grocery-lot event stands out from the driveway false alarms. Reviewing and organizing is free. Tesla's own site, dashcam.tesla.com, also plays clips in the browser and can download them as a ZIP.

3. Finding the right minute

You usually know roughly when and where it happened. In Curbwatch:

• Open the map and click the place the car was parked. Only the events from that spot stay in the queue.
• Pick the event whose time is just after the incident. It opens at the trigger, ten seconds before the car reacted.
• Scrub back through the last minute or two with all cameras side by side. The side cameras, the repeaters, usually have the clearest view of whatever touched the car.
• With Curbwatch Pro, the on-device scan marks every second of movement on the timeline and flags where a person or vehicle appears, so . and , step straight between the moments that matter. The scan runs free on the first 25 clips you review.

Your footage never leaves your Mac. The scan runs on your machine too.

4. If the clips show a lock

Since vehicle software 2026.20, released in late May 2026, the car encrypts new dashcam and Sentry clips by default. They keep the .mp4 name but no player can open them, and neither can Curbwatch. Curbwatch shows them with a lock instead of treating them as corrupt, so you can still see when and where each event happened.

• To watch or download an encrypted clip: sign in at dashcam.tesla.com with your Tesla account and plug the drive in. The site fetches the keys for your car and plays the clips in your browser. "Download All" gives you ordinary video files.
• To stop future clips being encrypted: in the car, go to Controls, then Safety, and turn off Encrypt Dashcam Recordings. Clips already on the drive stay encrypted.
• Cars with the older Intel media computer, roughly 2018 to early 2022 builds, don't encrypt at all.

5. What to hand to your insurer or the police

Ask them what they want before you export anything. Most accept the video files as they are. Whatever they ask for:

• Give them the whole event folder, not one file. Every camera and every minute, including event.json, which records the trigger time and location the car wrote down.
• Say that the times are the car's local time. Adjusters compare them against other records.
• Don't edit or re-save the originals. Keep the drive itself somewhere safe until the claim is closed.
• If they want a single video showing all angles at once, Curbwatch Pro exports the combined camera grid, or any one camera full-screen, for just the moment, the minutes around the trigger, or the full clip.

6. Didn't record?

Sentry Mode is off unless you turned it on, and many owners exclude home and work to save battery. If there's no folder for the time in question, check the Sentry settings in the car before assuming the drive failed. If the folder is there but some files are empty or won't play, that's common. The car sometimes loses power mid-write. Curbwatch plays whatever is intact and skips the rest.