All game captures stored on external drive disappeared

Try a hard reset along with making sure everything is connected properly. Beyond that I'm not sure why they would poof. Hopefully just temporary.

Hello Jarrett,

Sorry for the issue with your game captures. Was that the only thing on the HD? Were there any games on there, that are gone also? You may want to get with the manufacturer of the external HD, to see what they might tell you.

Thanks,

Brad

Unfortunately you can't use an external drive for both games and captures. You either need to add another hard drive formatted to ntfs or reformat your existing drive but that will mean you can't store games on it (so move any games before doing this).
Full details here:
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/console/capturing-game-clips-to-external-storage

Could you move games stored on your internal drive to the external drive if you have the space spare on the external drive? Details on how to do this here:

https://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/transfer-multiple-games-once

There is only a finite space on the console internal drive to store captures.

To my understanding, if you make a lot of game clips and screenshots that space is quickly used up and any subsequent captures will overwrite the oldest file on the drive if its full. This space is a reserved area in the system area and not the entire drive space.

If you upload your captures to the Xbox Network and/or OneDrive you can safely delete the captures on the internal drive using Manage captures on xbox console.

The alternative is to connect a external drive, formatted to NTFS, and change your capture location to the external drive. Be aware that this option doesn't allow sharing on the Xbox Network.

Clips take up a lot more of your internal drive space than screenshots.

There is only a finite space on the console internal drive to store captures.

To my understanding, if you make a lot of game clips and screenshots that space is quickly depleted and any subsequent captures will overwrite the oldest file on the drive if its full.

The capture space is a reserved area in the system area and not the entire drive space.

If you upload your captures to the Xbox Network and/or OneDrive you can safely delete the captures on the internal drive using Manage captures on xbox console.

The alternative is to connect a external drive, formatted to NTFS, and change your capture location to the external drive. Be aware that this option doesn't allow sharing on the Xbox Network.