You log in, ready to show your friends that cross-map throwing knife kill or that frame-perfect boss dodge in Elden Ring, only to find your gallery is a ghost town. It's a gut-wrenching feeling. You didn't delete them. You didn't authorize a purge. Yet, they're gone. If you're wondering why did Xbox delete all my clips, you aren't alone, and honestly, it’s usually not a random glitch. It’s actually a deliberate policy change that Microsoft rolled out to manage the massive amount of data being shoved into their cloud servers every single second.
Microsoft basically decided that the Xbox Network—formerly known as Xbox Live—isn't a permanent storage locker anymore. Storage is expensive. When millions of players are recording 4K HDR clips of every single goal in FC 25, the server costs go through the roof. So, they set a timer. If you didn't know the timer existed, your memories likely hit zero.
The 90-Day Purge Policy Explained
Starting in late 2023 and early 2024, Microsoft implemented a strict 90-day deletion policy for captures uploaded to the Xbox Network. This is the primary reason why your clips are gone. If a clip has been sitting on the Xbox Network for more than 90 days, it is eligible for automatic deletion. It doesn't matter how many likes it has or how much sentimental value it holds. If it’s on their servers and it’s old, it’s toast.
Think of the Xbox Network as a "temporary staging area" rather than a vault. You’ve probably seen the notifications on your dashboard, but let’s be real—most of us just clear those notifications while waiting for a game to load. Microsoft sent out messages via the Xbox Wire and system notifications warning that any captures older than 90 days would be deleted starting in January 2024. If you haven't checked your older clips since then, that’s almost certainly what happened.
What about the "Local" storage?
There is a big distinction here. Xbox consoles have two types of storage for clips: Internal Storage and the Xbox Network (Cloud). Your internal storage is limited by the size of your SSD. When that gets full, the console starts overwriting old clips to make room for new ones. However, even if your console isn't full, the cloud side has its own separate rules. Most people set their consoles to "Auto-upload to Xbox Network." This is great for sharing to the mobile app, but it triggers that 90-day countdown the second the upload finishes.
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Storage Management and the "Full Drive" Culprit
Sometimes it isn't the 90-day rule. Sometimes it’s just physics. If you’re playing on an Xbox Series S with a limited 512GB drive, space is at a premium. Captures take up more space than you’d think, especially if you’re recording in 4K.
When your internal storage hits a certain threshold—usually around 80% to 90% full—the system has to make a choice. It needs space for "Quick Resume" data, system updates, and save files. Captures are the first thing on the chopping block. Xbox might silently delete local copies of clips that have already been uploaded to the cloud to save space. Then, once those clips hit the 90-day mark in the cloud, they disappear from there too. It’s a double-whammy that leaves you with nothing.
High Resolution, High Problems
If you’ve switched to a Series X and you’re recording in 4K at 60fps, your clips are massive. A one-minute clip in 4K can be hundreds of megabytes. Compare that to the old 720p clips from the Xbox One era which were tiny. Because these files are so large, your "Capture" partition on the hard drive fills up significantly faster. Many players don't realize that the Xbox reserves a very specific, limited chunk of the SSD just for captures; it doesn't just use the whole 1TB drive. Once that small partition is full, the older clips are purged to make room for the new "Lebron James" dunk you just did in 2K.
Did a System Update Wipe Your Clips?
While less common, system updates or factory resets are notorious for clip loss. If you ever had to perform a "Reset but keep my games & apps" to fix a software bug, your clips might have been sacrificed. Local captures are not treated with the same "holy" status as game save data. While your Starfield progress is backed up religiously, those local MP4 files often aren't.
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There’s also the issue of external drives. If you were using a USB 3.0 drive to store clips and that drive was formatted incorrectly or disconnected during a write cycle, the file table can become corrupt. To the Xbox, a corrupt drive looks like an empty drive. You might see "No captures found" simply because the console can't read the directory anymore.
How to Save Your Future Captures from the Void
You can't get the old ones back. Once Microsoft deletes a clip from the Xbox Network after that 90-day window, it is gone from their servers forever. There is no "Trash" folder. However, you can prevent this from ever happening again by changing how you handle your media.
OneDrive is your best friend here. Microsoft allows you to set your Xbox to automatically upload every clip to OneDrive. Unlike the Xbox Network, OneDrive doesn't have a 90-day deletion policy. As long as you have space in your OneDrive account (which is 5GB for free, or 1TB with Microsoft 365), those clips will stay there until you manually delete them.
To set this up:
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- Press the Xbox button to open the guide.
- Go to Profile & system > Settings > Preferences > Capture & share.
- Select Automatic uploads.
- Change it to OneDrive.
The External Drive Hack
If you want to record longer clips (up to an hour) and ensure they never get deleted by the system, you need a dedicated external USB 3.0 (or faster) drive. When you format a drive as "Capture Location" on Xbox, the console stops trying to manage the files. It just dumps the raw video files onto the drive. You can then plug that drive into a PC and move the files to a permanent hard drive. This bypasses the Xbox Network entirely.
A quick warning on external drives: The drive must be formatted as NTFS on a PC first. If you let the Xbox format it for "Games and Apps," you won't be able to use it for captures. It has to be dedicated to media.
Common Misconceptions About Xbox Captures
Many people think that "favoriting" a clip or "sharing" it to their activity feed protects it. It doesn't. Sharing a clip to your activity feed just creates a link to the file on the Xbox Network. When the source file is deleted after 90 days, the post on your activity feed will simply show a "Content not found" error.
Another misconception is that the Xbox mobile app stores the clips. The app is just a window. It’s looking at the cloud. If you see a clip in your app, it’s not on your phone unless you specifically hit the "Save" button to download it to your phone's camera roll. If you have a clip you absolutely love, download it to your phone immediately. Don't trust the cloud to keep it for you.
Actionable Steps to Protect Your Library
To ensure you never have to ask "why did Xbox delete my clips" again, follow this checklist immediately:
- Audit your current gallery: Go to the "Captures" app on your console and filter by "On the Xbox Network." If you see anything you want to keep that is older than 30 days, select "Upload to OneDrive" or "Mobile" right now.
- Change your default upload settings: Move away from "Xbox Network" as your primary backup. Switch to OneDrive in the settings menu.
- Lower your resolution for "everyday" clips: If you're just recording funny glitches, you don't need 4K. Dropping to 1080p will significantly increase the number of clips your internal storage can hold before it starts auto-deleting.
- Check your OneDrive storage levels: If your OneDrive is full, the auto-upload will fail silently. You won't get a warning; the clips just won't go anywhere.
- Manually back up to a PC: Once a month, use the Xbox app on Windows to download your recent captures. It's the only way to be 100% sure they are safe from server-side policy changes.
Microsoft’s shift toward a "temporary" cloud model caught many players off guard. By treating the Xbox Network as a temporary transfer service rather than a permanent archive, you can manage your gaming highlights without the heartbreak of a disappearing gallery. Move your important files to a service you control, whether that's a physical hard drive, a PC, or a paid cloud storage account with no expiration dates.