Guides

When your Rivian’s USB drive is full: overwriting and backing up

Updated October 2026

A Rivian keeps recording even when its USB drive is full: it makes room by recording over the oldest footage. That’s convenient until the clip you needed is the one that gets replaced. Here’s how to stay ahead of it.

What fills the drive

Continuous drive recording (RoadCam DriveStream) uses by far the most space, because every camera records for the whole drive. Gear Guard and Incident Cam clips are shorter. A larger drive simply gives you more days before the oldest footage is replaced.

How long until something is overwritten?

That depends on the drive size and how much you drive. Overlook’s Storage tab looks at the drive you opened and shows:

• how much space each kind of recording uses;
• how fast new footage has been arriving, based on your recent days;
• an estimate of how long until the oldest recordings start to be replaced, and which important recordings are at risk.

Back up what matters

To your computer

Copy the folders for the recordings you want to keep to your computer or an external disk. Copy every camera for each recording. Overlook Pro can save selected recordings to a folder on your computer for you and remembers which are already saved.

To the cloud

With Overlook Plus, recordings are backed up to private cloud storage (100 GB or 500 GB). You can turn on automatic backup of Gear Guard events, incidents and saved clips whenever you open the drive, watch them on any phone or computer, and share a link. Backups stay in your account until you delete them, even after the drive records over them.

Keep the drive healthy

• Wait for recording to finish before unplugging, and eject the drive properly on your computer.
• Don’t format the drive on your computer unless you mean to erase it; let the vehicle format drives it uses.
• Drives wear out. If recordings start failing to save or play, replace the drive.

New to this? Start with how to open the drive.

More guides

• How to watch Rivian Gear Guard footage on a Mac or PCStep by step: take the USB drive out, open it on a computer, and play every camera in sync.
• What’s on your Rivian’s USB drive: folders and files explainedGearGuardVideo, RoadCam, IncidentCam, file names, cameras and 15-minute segments.
• Gear Guard vs RoadCam vs Incident Cam: what each Rivian camera mode recordsWhen each mode records, where it saves, and which to check after something happens.