Tucson, Arizona – A significant development in the search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, has revealed that the recovery of crucial security camera footage was largely due to the technical expertise of Google employees. The footage, showing a masked and armed individual outside Guthrie’s home on the night she disappeared, was initially believed to be inaccessible.
Authorities released the video on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, after a week-long search. According to a person familiar with the investigation, engineers at Google, which owns Nest, were able to recover data after several days of work. The task was described as “technically complex,” with investigators initially unsure if retrieval would be possible.
The FBI released the images within hours of obtaining them, according to a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. The recovered footage shows an individual tampering with a camera at Guthrie’s front door on February 1, 2026.
The initial assessment by Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos indicated that no video was available, stating that Guthrie “had no subscription” to Google’s video recording service, which stores footage from Nest cameras in the cloud. However, Nest cameras retain approximately three hours of “event-based” video history even without a subscription, stored in Google’s cloud and servers.
Even if data has been flagged for deletion, it may still be recoverable, explained Nick Barreiro, an audio-video forensic analyst and founder of Principle Forensics. “A delete function is just telling the file system to ignore that data and feel free to use that space on the hard drive for new data… so until it’s actually used again, that old data is still recoverable,” Barreiro said. “I’ve had cases where I could go back months or even years and find little fragments of video files that were still on the hard drive.”
FBI Director Kash Patel stated on social media that authorities, “working closely with our private sector partners,” recovered the video “from residual data located in backend systems.” Investigators had served a search warrant to Google for the Nest cameras at the Guthrie residence last week, a standard procedure in criminal investigations.
Adam Malone, a cyber crisis expert at Kroll and a former FBI special agent, explained the complex architecture of cloud-based video systems. He noted that video data passes through “layers and layers” of components for processing and delivery. These components, including those that compress and render the video, create multiple opportunities for data to be retained.
“All those layers have code, and as data moves around to be processed and made available to the customer, it will move through different layers of sub applications, sub servers, sub storage components,” Malone said. Each of these components could potentially hold recoverable data. He added that Google would have examined its development pipelines to identify any historical data that hadn’t been purged, potentially explaining why the footage remained accessible.
The recovered footage is now a key piece of evidence in the ongoing investigation. While the search for Nancy Guthrie continues, the collaboration between law enforcement and Google highlights the increasing role of technology and data recovery in modern criminal investigations. The FBI is actively seeking information about the individual depicted in the video, hoping to identify and locate them as quickly as possible.
