Why Your Dashcam Keeps Resetting the Time and Date (and the Fix)

You open a clip to settle a fender-bender and the timestamp reads January 1st, midnight, some year that has nothing to do with today. Or you set the clock, drive for a week, and find it has quietly drifted back to a default date again. It feels like a failing camera. It almost never is.

A dashcam keeps its own clock the way a microwave or a PC does — a tiny low-power counter that needs a constant trickle of energy to keep ticking. Cut that trickle and the count resets. So fixing a resetting clock is really a matter of working out which of three things is happening, then applying the one matching fix. This guide is a triage: match your symptom below, and you are usually done in five minutes.

The three symptoms are distinct and barely overlap: the clock resets to a default date every time the car sits; the clock is off by an exact number of whole hours; or every setting resets, not just the time. Find yours and skip straight to its section.

This is the classic. Park overnight, come back, and the clock is at some old default — Jan 1 2020, or the camera's manufacture date. The cause is the camera's onboard power reserve draining while the car is off.

Most modern dashcams use a supercapacitor instead of a battery, because a supercap tolerates the brutal heat of a parked windshield that would swell and kill a lithium cell. The trade-off: a supercap holds only enough charge to finish saving the current file and keep the clock alive for days, not weeks. Older battery-based cams hold time longer but degrade in heat. Either way, once the reserve empties, the clock stops counting and resets on next power-up.

There is a quick way to confirm this is your symptom: note how long the reset takes to appear. If the clock is fine after a quick shop-and-return but wrong after the car has sat overnight or for a couple of days, that is the reserve draining on schedule — a textbook power-reserve reset, not a firmware fault. Cold weather speeds it up, which is why some drivers only ever see this in winter. Where the camera lives matters too: our guide to dash cam placement covers mounting it where it gets both a clean power feed and a clear view of the sky for GPS.

The fixes, in order of how permanent they are: get a cam with GPS (covered below — it re-syncs the clock automatically every drive and ends the problem outright); hardwire the camera or use a dedicated battery pack so it never fully loses power; or, if it is an aging cam whose supercap has weakened, accept that it now needs the time set more often, or replace it. If yours has GPS and still resets, the GPS section is your real fix.

Here is the one that fools people. The date is right, the minutes are right, but the hour is off by exactly five, six, or seven. That is not a reset at all — the clock is keeping perfect time. It is a time-zone or daylight-saving setting.

A GPS dashcam reads time from the satellites, which broadcast UTC (the global reference time). The camera then applies your time-zone offset to show local time. If that offset is unset or wrong, you get a clock that is flawlessly accurate and consistently wrong by a clean number of hours — the giveaway that this, not the power reserve, is your problem.

The fix takes thirty seconds — set the zone offset to match where you drive:

• US Eastern — UTC-5 (standard) / UTC-4 (daylight)
• US Central — UTC-6 / UTC-5
• US Mountain — UTC-7 / UTC-6
• US Pacific — UTC-8 / UTC-7

Open the menu, find Time Zone or GMT/UTC offset, set your zone, and if the camera has a separate daylight-saving toggle, match it to the season. Set once, it holds — the GPS keeps re-supplying the underlying time, and your offset just shifts the display.

If the camera forgets not just the time but your resolution, parking-mode, and every other preference, this is not a clock-power problem. The camera is failing to save or read its own settings file, and there are two usual culprits:

• The microSD card — worn out by constant loop-recording, so it can no longer reliably hold the settings file.
• The firmware — an out-of-date or buggy build that corrupts the settings when it tries to save them.

The first is the microSD card. Dashcams punish cards with constant loop-recording writes, and a worn or failing card can stop holding the settings file. Reformat the card in the camera (not on a PC), and if it keeps happening, replace it with a fresh high-endurance card rated for dashcam use. The second is firmware: an out-of-date or buggy firmware build can corrupt settings. Check the manufacturer's site for a newer version and follow their update steps exactly.

One more quick check: if the camera lost power mid-write (a blown fuse, a loose power cable, an accessory socket that cuts with the ignition), it may never have committed your settings in the first place. Confirm the camera actually powers down cleanly rather than being yanked off power, then set your preferences once more.

A worn card is worth ruling out early because it quietly causes other faults too — dropped clips, freezes, corrupted recordings — so if you have been fighting more than just the clock, start here. Buy a card specifically rated for dash cams (high-endurance or a card the camera maker lists as compatible) rather than a cheap phone card, which is not built for the relentless overwrite cycle a dash cam demands. If a fresh high-endurance card and current firmware still don't hold the settings, the camera's own memory or controller may be failing, and it is time to consider a replacement — a current model with GPS solves the clock half of the problem for good.

A GPS dashcam doesn't just record where you drove — it quietly fixes its own clock every time you start the car.

If your camera has GPS, the resetting-clock problem largely solves itself — and knowing why is the single most useful thing here. Every GPS satellite carries an atomic clock and broadcasts extremely precise time along with position. A GPS-equipped dashcam re-reads that time on every drive the moment it gets a satellite fix, usually within a minute of starting the car.

So even if the supercapacitor drains completely overnight and the clock resets to a default, the camera silently corrects itself as you pull out of the driveway. You may never even see the wrong time. The only thing you must set is the time-zone offset from Symptom B — get that right once and a GPS cam is effectively self-correcting forever.

This is why, if you are shopping for a replacement because the clock drives you mad, GPS is the feature to prioritise. It also stamps speed and location onto your footage, which is exactly the corroborating detail an insurer or the police care about when a timestamp is questioned.

Work these top to bottom and stop at the one that matches — most people are done within the first three:

1. Name what resets. Only the time and date? Power reserve or GPS offset (Symptoms A/B). Every setting? Jump to the SD-card and firmware steps.
2. Off by whole hours? Set the time-zone / UTC offset and the DST toggle. Done.
3. Has GPS? Confirm it is enabled and getting a fix (a GPS icon or a speed readout). Let it sync on a short drive with a clear sky view.
4. No GPS, resets after parking? Hardwire the cam or add a battery pack so it never loses power; or simply reset the time knowing you'll redo it periodically as the supercap ages.
5. Everything resets? Reformat the card in-camera, then update the firmware; replace the card if it recurs.

A dashcam whose timestamp you can't trust is a camera doing half its job — the footage is only as useful as the date attached to it. Five minutes of the right fix restores the whole point of having mounted it.

If it also reboots, see our fix for a dash cam that keeps restarting.