GUIDE
How to record something that already happened
10 August 2026
The bug appeared, did the thing, and vanished — and you were not recording. Here is how to save it anyway.
The free way: Xbox Game Bar
Windows already does this, and hardly anyone knows. The Game Bar keeps a rolling buffer of the last few minutes so you can save something after it has happened.
Turn it on in Settings → Gaming → Captures —
Record what happened — and choose how far back to keep, from 30
seconds up to 10 minutes. Then press
Win + Alt + G when something happens and
it saves to Videos\Captures.
It is free, built in, and if you are capturing a game it may be all you need.
Where that falls short
The Game Bar is built for games. Background recording does not capture the desktop or File Explorer at all — the two places a bug you want to prove usually happens. It records the foreground app only, so it cannot show something that spanned several windows, and it will not start on many ordinary applications.
What Clarus adds
Instant Replay is the same idea without the games-only restriction. Arm it and Clarus records continuously into a rolling buffer; press Ctrl + Alt + C and the last few minutes become a normal recording.
It captures the screen rather than one app, so the desktop, File Explorer and anything spanning several windows are all fair game. Microphone and system audio are mixed in, so whatever was said or played is in the clip too.
The saved clip lands as an ordinary recording — same card, same editor — so you can trim it down to the ten seconds that matter before sending it.
How it avoids filling your disk
The buffer is a ring of short segments that are continuously overwritten, so neither memory nor disk grows while it is armed. Nothing is kept unless you press the shortcut, and the buffer is wiped when you disarm it or quit.
The honest limits
It is off by default, because continuous recording is not something to switch on for somebody without asking. It cannot run at the same time as a normal recording — one or the other. And it is local only: nothing is uploaded unless you choose to share the clip afterwards.
Which to choose
If you only ever need this for games, the Game Bar is free and already installed. Clarus is worth it if the thing you need to catch happens on the desktop, in File Explorer, or across several windows — which, for bugs, is most of the time.