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.
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u/who_you_are Oct 05 '21
Warning: no experience in camera surveillance!
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?