How-to guides
How to choose recording retention and size storage for your security cameras
Retention should be set by how long it takes your property to discover and report an incident, not by whatever drive came in the recorder. Work out the days you need, then size storage from each camera's actual bitrate.
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The recorder overwrites the oldest footage when the drive fills. If a resident reports a theft nine days later and the recorder holds seven days, the footage is already gone. That is the most common way properties lose evidence they actually had.
Step one: decide how many days you need
Working out retention
- 1
Estimate the discovery delay
How long between an incident and someone noticing? A vacant building or a jobsite closed over a holiday may not be checked for days. A resident may not report a missing package until the weekend.
- 2
Add the reporting and request delay
Police reports, insurance claims and board meetings take time, and requests for footage often arrive after the first week.
- 3
Check your obligations
Some leases, insurance policies, contracts and local rules set minimum or maximum retention. Ask your insurer, counsel or management company; do not guess.
- 4
Pick a number with margin
Add a buffer to the total. Many properties land on 30 days as a working default, with shorter or longer periods where their situation calls for it.
- 5
Write it down
A written retention policy tells residents and staff what to expect, and helps explain why older footage no longer exists.
Step two: size the storage
Storage depends on each camera's bitrate, which is set in the camera or recorder and varies with resolution, frame rate, compression and how busy the scene is. Look up the configured or average bitrate for each camera, rather than trusting a calculator's default.
GB per day = bitrate in Mbps x 10.8
TB needed = (sum of all cameras' GB per day x retention days) / 1000
Example: 8 cameras at 4 Mbps, 30 days
4 x 10.8 = 43.2 GB/day per camera
43.2 x 8 x 30 = 10,368 GB, about 10.4 TB, before any marginThe 10.8 comes from converting megabits per second to gigabytes per day (1 Mbps is about 0.45 GB per hour). The example bitrate is for illustration only; use your own settings. Then add headroom, because drives should not run to the last gigabyte and busy scenes push bitrate up, especially at night with IR noise and rain.
| Setting | Effect on storage | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| H.265 instead of H.264 | Usually smaller files for similar quality | Check your viewing software and any export player support it |
| Smart codec modes | Lower bitrate on static scenes | Can reduce detail in fast motion on some models |
| Lower frame rate | Proportionally less storage | Too low and you miss a hand movement or a plate |
| Motion or event recording | Large savings on quiet cameras | Missed lead-in if pre-record is too short; gaps if detection misses |
| Continuous main stream plus event clips | Most storage | Simplest to search and least likely to miss something |
Step three: choose the hardware
- Use surveillance-rated drives. They are designed for constant writing, unlike desktop drives.
- Consider redundancy. A single failed drive takes its footage with it. Recorders that support RAID or mirroring let you lose a drive without losing the footage, at the cost of extra drives.
- Keep the recorder somewhere cool and locked. Heat shortens drive life, and a recorder that walks out the door takes the evidence with it.
- Back up events off-site. Cloud backup of flagged events, or a monitoring platform that stores clips, means the key footage survives if the recorder is stolen or damaged.
Solar and cellular sites usually keep full footage locally and send only events, because bandwidth is limited. See cameras on sites with no power and no network. When an incident does happen, export the footage promptly so retention never becomes the issue.
Common questions
- How long should security camera footage be kept?
- Long enough to cover the time it takes to discover, report and request footage for an incident, plus margin. Many properties use 30 days as a working default, but check leases, insurance terms and local rules for your situation.
- How much storage does one camera need?
- Multiply the camera's bitrate in Mbps by about 10.8 to get gigabytes per day of continuous recording, then multiply by retention days. Use the actual configured bitrate, and leave headroom.
- Does motion recording save storage?
- Yes, often a lot on quiet cameras. Set a pre-record buffer so you see what led up to the event, and accept that a missed detection means no footage for that moment.
Still stuck?
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