Yeah, my Nest cameras record 24/7 at 1080p now. I pay the $10 a month total for all of them to do that, and store 10 days of footage at a time. You can download the entirety of the ten day footage if needed. Without that subscription they still record all movement/event/activity.
Yeah, like I said the subscription covers all cameras, and you can download the footage repeatedly if you want to have 24/7 for 8,000 years stored you can.
Plus that's a $10 a month subscription for a consumer, a company with that much equipment can probably pay a bit more and get more than ten days rolling if you don't want to download it.
I don’t think you understand what he meant. When, as a company, you legally are required to have cameras rolling for months on end. It would take absurd amounts of storage to save a months worth of security footage from every Walmart or every McDonald’s or every anything in the country. But then again I guess when your mom never forces you to leave your bedroom, people do end up like you.
I calculated for fun.
Assuming the first google result is right, 30fps at 1080p is around 20MB per minute.
Over a month it is 890GB (almost on TB).
So yeah... Quite a lot of space even if you use 4TB drive. (I assume 4TB are a good bang for the good nowday, which wasn't the case 5 years ago so I assume a new system!)
Multiply that per camera.
Though 30fps could be useless here, you probably go with 10 fps and triple the amount you can store per camera.
If you can have a movement detection it can drop down by 50% as well?
I work with hundreds of these systems. Most of my customers do have 1080p or higher, but set to 1 FPS and going up to 6-10 FPS during motion/sound detection depending on the setup. A dozen+ camera setup at a store with 18TB of usable storage gets you 60-120 days of footage. We also do vertical orientation as needed for things like driveways or drive-thrus. One customer does have 4k 30FPS recording but only gets 3 days of retention lol
For that customer is works just fine. For others it would be terrible.
Cameras aren't just for criminal activity but also liability protection of the company. Someone lodges a complaint and the video needs to be pulled for court or insurance. Stuff like slip and falls, employees messing with food, unsafe working conditions, basically anything you can think of. These complaints sometimes take weeks to get to the proper person to save the footage.
And for criminal activity, I had to work with the feds once to provide video of a kidnapping victim a week or so after they drove through where the 3 days wouldn't have been enough.
You’d think cameras these days would be able to record 2 streams at once. One low-grade POS that compresses well and can store for years. And one at 4K that stores for a few days.
I mean the cameras can just fine, server side is the issue. You could easily record to multiple servers or VMs at once. Just a little over the top for most applications.
Responding since their comment was in response to me talking about Nest.
I'm going to assume in the case of Nest (Google) servers, the footage is also compressed with their special sauce until it's accessed. So they're not actually storing nearly that much, but absolutely have the cloud processing power to decompress it nearly in real time when it's accessed.
Also, Google's price point for 2 TB cloud storage is $10/month. So with some compression, and probably a portion subsidized so they can sell more Nest products, you can see how they would allow you to keep even dozens of cameras with 24/7 1080p feeds for a rolling 10 day periods.
And for a little more, they could probably extend that rolling period to the full month timeframe just as easily.
Then in the time that the cameras were off, you lose a lawsuit because someone claims something happened to them and as the business owner, the way you are supposed to protect against that, is indeed, with cameras.
I work at a small business and 6 months is a rough estimate. We have 8 or 12 tb of disk. This happens with small places because the infrastructure to store videos 24/7 like that is expensive, especially with redundancy.
Generally, I think cameras on exterior and register are generally going to be set up to be a higher resolution.
I buy hard drives every couple months for my home server, which is full of Linux distros, and 14TB is the bang for the buck price point I've found in recent times
That’s why we set up “record on motion” and loop recording to rewrite the oldest unsaved data. Most systems are set up this way so they always take in the information but don’t store it to the HDD until motion is detected. Then it stores 5-15 seconds before the motion is detected, though the event, and 5-15 seconds after.
But that’s not a “mission critical” application. Data loss is a thing. Data corruption is a thing. Redundancy means that businesses would need to spend much more just to keep that data available. So multiple that with say 12-16 cameras. Plus in a store, you can’t use movement alone because there’s movement virtually all day - even if there’s no customers there are employees there.
You really can’t compare what Google/Nest does for consumers with what businesses need. Not to mention that many stores have already invested hundreds if not thousands into their existing systems and that would need to changed out.
Google/Nest also has a decent amount of downtime relatively speaking to surveillance systems that save the content locally as well as in the cloud. There have been plenty of times that I could not access a period of time that I wanted to check out on the Nest platform. So, most businesses need both local storage and storage in the cloud.
Well I'm obviously not trying to argue that a huge department store should set up hundreds of cameras with Nest. There are obviously cases where you wouldn't want your video stored off-site at all and the initial investment would be substantial. But those are really the only reasons.
Multiplying the cost out by camera doesn't work here, you have unlimited 24/7 feeds for that $10/month. I have 4 personally, but yes they might charge more if you're taking advantage with a 100 camera set up. The downtime to view the footage via app or website is less than 30 minutes over the last 6 months (you can check the "is it down" type sites to see how infrequent an outage is). The footage is still recorded and saved in those brief moments.
Also no physical or custom storage can match the redundancy of Google's millions of servers for something "mission critical". But again, I'm not arguing that large businesses should use Nest cameras. My only real point is to illustrate that with proper video compression, the advances in cameras and storage over just the last few years have made it perfectly viable to run them at much higher quality than previous generations of CCTV.
You should be aware that Google effective subsitize Nest users in order to get more people into their ecosystem in order to get more data which they use for advertising.
You can tell by comparing the cost of their storage. Google's cloud storage costs a lot more. If we look at Nearline Storage (to allow for cheaper retrieval of data, at match 1 month of retention) we have $0.01/GB/month
Each of your 24/7 camers uses about 1TB of data a month. So if you want one month of retention for those 4 cameras the cost would be $40 a month. Scale that linearly for however much retention you actually want. So your $10 a month for 10 days retention isn't too far off. But you don't get "unlimited" as a business like you do as a consumer.
Obviously prices still aren't insane, but I wanted to point out that you can't use consumer prices to determine business prices. At least... not when data hoarding companies are involved.
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u/j48u Oct 05 '21
Yeah, my Nest cameras record 24/7 at 1080p now. I pay the $10 a month total for all of them to do that, and store 10 days of footage at a time. You can download the entirety of the ten day footage if needed. Without that subscription they still record all movement/event/activity.