Start with the investigation window
Thirty days may fit a property where events are recognized quickly. Sixty or ninety days may be more appropriate when billing cycles, tenant reports, inventory checks, travel, or delayed incident discovery are common. Regulatory, contractual, or insurance requirements should be confirmed separately.
Understand the variables
Storage depends on camera count, resolution, bitrate, codec, frame rate, image complexity, motion, lighting noise, audio, recording schedule, and whether recording is continuous or event-based.
- Higher resolution and frame rate generally create more data
- Busy scenes often use more bandwidth than quiet scenes
- Efficient compression helps, but image quality must remain useful
- Redundancy or failover may require additional capacity
Validate the estimate in operation
A professional design establishes a reasonable estimate, then verifies actual daily consumption after commissioning. Retention, camera health, time synchronization, and available capacity should be checked during maintenance because settings and scene conditions can change.