“Can you pull the footage from three weeks ago?” It is one of the first questions we hear after an incident — and sometimes the answer is disappointing. Footage does not last forever. Every system overwrites its oldest video eventually, and how long yours keeps it depends on choices made when the system was designed.
The short answer
Most Calgary businesses keep about two to four weeks of footage. Condos commonly keep 30 days for common areas. Those are useful rules of thumb, but they are not guarantees. Your actual retention could be shorter — or much longer — depending on your cameras, settings, and storage.
If you need to know your number, do not guess. Check your recorder’s settings or ask your installer. Knowing your retention before an incident is far better than discovering it afterwards.
What decides retention
Four factors matter most. First, the number of cameras: more cameras fill a drive faster. Second, resolution: a 4K camera uses far more storage than a standard HD camera. Third, drive size: a larger hard drive simply holds more days of video.
Fourth, and often most important, is how you record. Continuous recording captures everything, around the clock, and fills drives quickly. Motion-based recording only saves video when something moves, which can stretch retention dramatically in quiet areas — but it must be set up carefully so nothing important is missed.
Frame rate and compression matter too, but the big levers are cameras, resolution, drive size, and motion versus continuous recording. Change any one of them and your retention changes with it.
Why footage disappears before you need it
The most common reason is late reporting. A break-in, a slip, or a package theft might not be noticed for days, and by the time someone asks for video, the drive has already looped over it. This is especially common in parkades, storage rooms, and other areas people do not check daily.
Overwritten drives are the other culprit. A system does not warn you before it deletes old footage; it simply records over it to make room for new video. That is normal behaviour, not a fault — but it means retention is a countdown, not a vault.
Regular system checks help. Our security maintenance plans include checking that cameras, recorders, and storage are working as expected, so a failed drive or a misaligned camera does not quietly shorten your retention.
Cloud vs. local storage
Local storage keeps video on a recorder or server at your site. It is straightforward and has no monthly storage fee, but if the recorder is stolen or damaged, the footage can go with it. Cloud storage, by contrast, keeps video off-site on a provider’s servers for a set period in the plan you choose.
Cloud plans make retention predictable: you choose, for example, 30 or 60 days, and footage is kept for that period. The trade-off is an ongoing subscription and a reliance on your internet connection. Many sites use a mix — local recording for day-to-day use, with cloud backup or video monitoring in Calgary for critical cameras.
Our recommendations by site type
For retail, we generally recommend 30 days. That covers most theft, return disputes, and incidents that surface after a weekend or a holiday. For condo common areas — lobbies, parkades, amenity rooms — 30 days is also a sensible standard, giving boards time to review an incident without storing video indefinitely.
For industrial sites, we recommend 30 to 60 days, depending on the site. Larger yards, higher-value inventory, and incidents that may only be found during a monthly audit all argue for the longer end of that range. The right answer depends on your risk, your cameras, and how quickly incidents are usually reported.
The key point is this: retention should be a choice, not an accident. When we design a system, we size storage at design time around the retention you actually need — camera count, resolution, and recording mode included — rather than leaving you to discover the limit later. See our security cameras in Calgary for the systems we install and support.
Not sure how long your current system keeps footage, or whether it is enough? Contact Bordo Security for a free quote at 403-397-3300. We will check your setup and tell you, plainly, what your retention is — and what it would take to get it where you need it.
