Do Video Doorbells Get Stolen?

Yes, it happens — and it is almost certainly not the thing you should be worried about. A doorbell is screwed to a wall, typically in view of its own lens, and it has close to no resale value because the unit is bound to an account. As thefts of opportunity go, it is a poor one.

The reason to think about it at all is subtler and much more important. On a lot of doorbells, the footage lives inside the device. eufy rates around 90 daysof video on the 8GB of storage built into the E340 — which is generous, and which is also sitting on the wall outside your front door. If somebody removes the doorbell, they have removed the only recording of themselves doing it. The device is the archive, and the archive just walked off.

So this page is not really about theft. It is about a design question that nobody asks in the shop: where does your doorbell write the video, and can that place be carried away?

The three places a doorbell can put your footage

Inside itself.A microSD card in the unit, or built-in flash. This is the cheapest and most common arrangement and it is what makes no-fee recording possible — TP-Link publishes microSD up to 512GB on the D225, and eufy publishes the 8GB on-device storage on the E340 with no monthly fee. It is also the arrangement with this single weakness.

Inside your house. A base station, a network video recorder, or a server. This is the arrangement that solves the problem, and Reolink is the brand that publishes the most options: for its Battery Video Doorbell (2nd Gen) it states “No Monthly Fees for Local Storage” and lists four destinations — microSD, a Reolink Home Hub, an NVR, or your own FTP server. Three of those four are indoors. eufy’s E340 is also compatible with HomeBase 2 and HomeBase 3, which moves the storage off the doorbell and into the hallway.

TP-Link gets there by a different route on the D225: it is one of only three battery-capable Tapo models TP-Link lists as supporting RTSP and ONVIF, and only while continuously powered — which makes it the rare battery doorbell that can feed a local recorder or Home Assistant. TP-Link also warns, usefully, that cloud storage, card storage and ONVIF recording cannot all run at the same time, so you are choosing one.

In somebody else’s data centre.A cloud-only doorbell is, oddly, immune to this specific problem: the footage was never on the device, so removing the device changes nothing about the recording. The catch is the one this whole site is about — that storage is the thing you rent, which is covered in do video doorbells need a subscription? And note what the Home Assistant project documents about Ring: playing back the last recording through the integration requires a Ring Protect plan.

Where each doorbell we cover writes the video

The third row is the whole page. Every doorbell here can be made theft-resilient, and on three of the four it costs nothing beyond choosing the right storage destination during setup — a five-minute decision most people never make because the default is the card in the unit.

Four things that actually reduce the risk

Use the security screw. Nearly every doorbell ships with one, and nearly nobody fits it, because the quick-release mount is quicker. The screw is the difference between a device that lifts off a bracket and one that needs a tool. It takes ten seconds.

Store the footage off the device. If your doorbell supports a hub, an NVR or an FTP target, use it. This is the only item on the list that makes the theft irrelevant rather than less likely, and on the Reolink it is simply a setting.

Add a second angle.A doorbell is a bad witness to its own removal, because the person taking it is directly underneath it with their hands in the frame and their face above it. A cheap wired camera covering the porch from the side costs a fraction of the doorbell and records continuously — and it is the camera that will actually identify somebody. Our indoor camera picks and no-subscription ranking both have options under the price of a takeaway.

Mount it at the height the maker recommends, angled across the step. This is better for recognition and incidentally less convenient to grab. A doorbell staring straight out at chest height records the tops of heads; one angled slightly across the approach catches faces. The published guidance is in where to place security cameras, and the doorbell-specific fitment questions — wiring, chimes, and whether your door even has the transformer for it — are in video doorbell installation.

One more reason to hardwire it

A hardwired doorbell is marginally harder to remove, because it is attached to low-voltage wiring rather than clipped to a bracket. But the real benefit is a different one. TP-Link specifies 24/7 continuous recording on the D225 when it is hardwired, and event-only on battery. A battery doorbell wakes when it detects something, which means the first second or two of an approach is often missing — and the approach is the part with the face in it. The full trade is in do security cameras record all the time?

Three doorbells that keep the footage out of reach

From our no-subscription doorbell ranking. All three record with no monthly fee, and all three publish a way to put the video somewhere other than the doorbell.