In The Trenches Video Series
Security Experts Discuss How Long Do Security Cameras Store Footage
In this series we're talking about how long do security cameras store footage.
Our speakers today are:
- > Gil Illescas
- > Ben Larue
- > James Campbell
Video Transcript
Gil Illescas:
I wonder if people understand what storing in the cloud is though, right? Is it just a bunch of hard drives floating in the clouds?
Ben Larue:
Hey, everyone, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Myth Busters. Can we call it that? Is that a trademark still? James, our legal team, we're going to get on that, we're going to figure out if that's a trademark or not. But welcome to SCW's version of Myth Busters, and we could spell it differently if we need to. We've got some awesome experts with us again today, James and Gil. How you guys doing?
James Campbell:
Good. I think we're the Security Myth dash Busters. I think that's-
Ben Larue:
Ah.
Gil Illescas:
Oh, we're we're demystifying.
Ben Larue:
Yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. We're good there. Okay, great. Great. Makes me feel better. Today, we're talking about storage. We're going to be busting the myths of storage in surveillance systems. There's too many myths. There's too many just to pick one so that's why we're going to be just unpacking it all, and we're going to be diving into all the different questions we get asked, maybe common misconceptions, things like that.
Gil Illescas:
Cool.
Ben Larue:
I think, first, where we should begin though, gentlemen, is where exactly does the footage go? How do systems record?
Gil Illescas:
A whole bunch of VCRs that are in a closet. Oh, no, that was 20 years ago.
James Campbell:
It could be anywhere, right? We have a lot of options these days. Let's talk about the typical setup that most people end up having is an NVR, or a DVR potentially too. And, typically, in those setups, the storage are right in those devices or in the DVR, they're in the NVR, hence the network video recorder are part of the acronym, or the DVR, digital video recorder. So the hard drives are typically stored there, and then, of course, we have cloud, which I don't even know if we want to touch, but that would potentially be stored on a server somewhere with Amazon or somebody else.
Ben Larue:
I think it's important to cover cloud. Sorry, Gil.
Gil Illescas:
That's alright. Whatever the device is that we say the storage is going on, it has to have something inside of it that actually stores the data.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha. That's a very good way of putting it actually, right? Because you can even have, I think, what people recall onboard storage, right?
James Campbell:
Yeah. I was just about say that sometimes cameras, you can get SD cards or some of even have them built in now where they can store straight to the camera too. So there's a bunch of different ways where your footage could be stored, but I think one reality is it does have to record somewhere, whether that's internal on a central storage like an NVR or potentially in a cloud. Those are three of the most common, I would say. But really in the industry, I don't know what percentage it is really, but for the vast majority, I would say you have an NVR and it's stored locally just for various reasons.
Gil Illescas:
I wonder if people understand what storing in the cloud is though. Is it just like a bunch of hard drives floating in the cloud.
Ben Larue:
Right.
James Campbell:
Floats in there and everything's perfect.
Ben Larue:
Right and I think that it is such a good place to go. First, I think let's understand kind of where the industry is dominantly, and I think I would agree that it's in local on premise or maybe backed up somewhere else, but generally on device somewhere, right? On an NVR.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, I mean from the earliest days of recording video, it's been onsite storage.
Ben Larue:
Right.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. If you want to go back to the history of it, like we talked about prior, it all started with VCRs and it had tapes. And then it morphed into hard drives. And actually there were other types of storage. There were DAT drives and eight millimeter and all kinds of different things that you could use back then, that different companies tried to invent to be the storage of the future. But it all ended up being hard drives.
Ben Larue:
Right.
Gil Illescas:
Fun fact, casinos used to have to have a camera per location and every camera had its own VCR and every tape had to be replaced every day. So they had a gentleman and his full-time primary job was to be the tape replacer.
Ben Larue:
Wow.
Gil Illescas:
At every casino.
Ben Larue:
That's wild. That is wild. We've come a long way since the tape replacer.
Gil Illescas:
Come a long way.
Ben Larue:
That's for sure. And I'm going to start using that term all the time. That's awesome. That's great. So we have come a long way. We have come a long way. The predominant way people store is usually using hard drives. And these are surveillance rated hard drives? Are these special hard drives? What kind of hard drives are these? Like the one that's in my computer?
James Campbell:
So a hard drive is kind of the same one that you'd have if your desktop computer did have a hard drive still. But they're built differently. They're built for 24/7 operation, to be operating all the time, to be writing to the hard drive all the time. Whereas your desktop computer at work, you're on it for eight hours a day and then really you're only probably writing a small amount of data throughout the day, whereas a video, you get 10 cameras that's recording all of them at the same time. It's a pretty big workload. So they're built to survive that workload and you definitely want to make sure you get surveillance grade drive. That's like one of the biggest myths off the top of the head that they can just go on Amazon by the cheapest hard drive and then six months later their hard drive stops working and they lost all their footage and they're not recording until they replace one. Pretty big issue.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I'd say it's very common, very common. We said a lot of great things there. I want to back up and say, okay, so we get an NVR or back in the day we get a DVR. Does it come with hard drives in it? What's the deal? It sounds like I can put my own hard drives in it, maybe potentially?
Gil Illescas:
Sometimes. Sometimes they sell them in the box with a drive in it, just pre-configured, done. Pretty simple, usually smaller or consumer grade stuff. But if you have recorders that are adaptable to bigger hard drives or more storage, then you can adapt those with adding the hard drives after the fact. So you have some recorders that have a single bay for a single hard drive. Some have up to four, some have up to 16. It all depends on what you want to get. And then you can add storage after the fact as you need it. So usually start with a minimum amount of storage based on how much storage time you need, and then you can add from there if your recorder will allow that. So you can start with smaller drives too, like 2, 4, 6, 8 terabyte, and then find out, okay, I need a little bit extra. Nowadays you can go to a 12 and even a 14 terabyte now I think we're rated it. Yeah.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha. So it's very a la carte now.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I was going to say, I think that's the biggest change in the last, yeah, we're still storing them on the same kind of hard drive, but the sizes have gone up a lot over the last, I remember I got a six terabyte drive and I actually posted on social media, I'm like, "This is the coolest thing." It's like how many hours of video, how many hours of songs you could listen to on it. And now we're up to 14 on a single disc. So we're doing a lot of the similar stuff that has been done a while, but obviously hard drive technology has improved over the last 20 years as well to make them more compact, cooler, everything that an NVR needs for them to work right.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha. So I'm starting to get things, okay, I got the system, I've got an NVR, something to report. I need to get hard drives to put in it. It sounds like I can add hard drives if I need to. I can kind of expand.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, yeah.
Ben Larue:
[inaudible 00:08:11].
Gil Illescas:
You might have a recorder that has two hard drives bays, but you start with one and you have an extra hard drive bay to add storage down the road. And like I said, that's configurable based on what type of recorder you have. We have, what's the biggest one we have? 16 drive bays.
James Campbell:
We have one that does 24, I think.
Gil Illescas:
24, there you go. That's monstrous, right? You can just [inaudible 00:08:36].
Ben Larue:
That's a lot. Right. So before we get into any of the questions I have regarding that, let's first cover exactly how do I determine what size hard drive I need? Or how many hard drives? And that type of stuff. What factors go into that?
Gil Illescas:
Well, you just weigh the hard drive and if it weighs two pounds, then that will get you approximately two weeks of storage. No.
Ben Larue:
Oh, yes.
Gil Illescas:
By weight.
Ben Larue:
Finally, someone explained it to me. Thank you.
Gil Illescas:
No. No.
James Campbell:
I wish.
Gil Illescas:
Well then I guess we have to do calculations, right?
James Campbell:
Yeah. I think that's where going with somebody, not to press the sales button yet, but.
Ben Larue:
[inaudible 00:09:19].
James Campbell:
Going with somebody that's actually going to work with you to figure that out. So you don't have to know what a terabyte is, when you call us. You're going to say "Hey, I really want to retain about two weeks of footage." And we're going to sit there, we're going to calculate, so there's a lot of factors that get involved. We'll calculate that out and get you the number that you need and install it for you and everything like that. But Gil, do you want to talk about the different numbers that we're going to have to put in this calculator?
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, so you're going to need to know, obviously frame rates. So how many frames per second that you're interested in getting recordings of and that matters. Well, back in the day, they used to say that 24 frames per second was what the human eye could see. So a lot of people want to get somewhere in there. You see 30 frames per second as a standard. So you calculate that with your file size, which is your frame rate. I mean, I'm sorry, your resolution. These days, obviously we're working a lot with four and eight terabyte record cameras, and those have higher resolutions, which means they have a higher frame rate, so to speak. I guess that would be the proper term. And then that calculation goes together and creates how much total storage a single camera recording would be for a certain time period. Time period is the other factor. How long do we want to record that particular camera with those particulars coming from it, the frame rate, the resolution and the time.
Ben Larue:
Makes sense. So then we get those numbers, we calculate how many terabytes or how much space of hard drive base we need, and then that'll tell us kind of like what hard drives to buy.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, and the other piece of the puzzle also is how much movement is in the picture. Because what the way our compression works these days, it takes a key frame and it does that as a base and then has frames adjusting with all the movement associated with it. So the more movement in it makes a bigger file, which causes the requirement for more storage space. So that's something to keep in mind because if you have a camera looking at a field where there's nothing happening versus a camera looking at a train station, where everything is happening, you're going to have different file size because of so much more movement. This all goes into the blender, so to speak, and spits out a base number of storage amount that's going to be required for the time you need.
Ben Larue:
So there's a lot that goes into it, is what I'm hearing more than you need this one to start.
Gil Illescas:
Yes. Yes. But we have calculators for that, thank God.
James Campbell:
Yeah, that's what I was about to say. Luckily we got a calculator on our website that sort of simplifies that. So you go in and the first option on the calculator is number of cameras, and you would put in how many cameras you have. And then next step is days of footage, and you're going to put in how many days of footage do I want to retain. Now this is a question that you're going to have to ask because some people are fine with just having seven days, and when we say days of retention, that means that in day number seven, what happens is the NVR doesn't just erase the entire hard drive. It's going to go back to day number one and start overriding that. And so your oldest footage on hand is going to be erased as time goes on.
Gil Illescas:
And that's called what?
James Campbell:
Recycling.
Gil Illescas:
FIFO, how we call that?
James Campbell:
What was that? I'm sorry?
Gil Illescas:
FIFO.
James Campbell:
FIFO. I'm not sure if I heard that term.
Gil Illescas:
First in, first out.
James Campbell:
Oh, first and first out.
Ben Larue:
First in out.
Gil Illescas:
FIFO.
James Campbell:
I usually use the recycling symbol as my analogy for people or a snake eating its own tail. We've used that a lot at SCW. I don't don't know why.
Gil Illescas:
Snake eating its tail, I like that.
James Campbell:
Kind of gross too. But yeah, we've used that. But yeah, that's kind of how it is. So you might be in a situation where certain industries require you to have 30 days of footage. Some of them require you to have 60, 90, sometimes more. It really depends on what you're comfortable with doing. Of course, the more you have, you're going to have to pay for more hard drives, et cetera. So typically people keep it about two weeks on average I would say, in my experience.
So yeah, usually would select how many days you want in there. Then you select your resolution and frames per second, which are going to be depending on what cameras you're purchasing, and then it's going to spit out a number. And that number is either by motion recording or by continuous recording. And so with motion, it's just giving you about a high estimate, about 75% activity, so that way you're covered just in case you end up having one that's on all day and one that's maybe less busy. And so it averages out.
And that way you'll know exactly how much terabytes you have. You can also, of course, again, ask us, and we're happy to clarify that. Especially for larger ones, that's where you really want to start digging in. When you have a hundred cameras and you need to retain 30 days, that's when you really want to start digging into... start to calculate that almost on an individual camera basis so you don't underestimate where you're going to need to get that time period, but also you don't overestimate it to where you're spending so much on hard drives that end up being overkill.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah.
James Campbell:
You got to find that medium.
Gil Illescas:
That's perfect explanation, James. You nailed it. Everything you said is what's required. And the back end of these calculators that we have, and a lot of other brands in the industry have, they all pretty much do the exact same thing. They just do it in different ways. But they spit out the same thing. You put in the information pretty much the same, and it works good and it gets you close. The biggest problem I've ever seen clients have with storage is they're not sure where that end storage date should be. I'll give you a prime example. We had an incident actually in our own company yesterday where our warehouse needed to search something out because a client said they didn't get something. They went back to go find the footage and had just started recording over that information. That happens to a lot of people a lot of time because you just need to be aware of exactly how much storage you need to be able to go back long enough to find the footage that you require.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
If I can think of anything to tell you, figure that number out.
Ben Larue:
And it may be different depending on the industry or your situation or circumstances, but.
Gil Illescas:
Oh, it's different for everybody. I mean, in the retail world, you might have someone come back eight months later with a slip and fall. They finally decide to go get a lawyer or something, right? Yeah I don't know what the statute of limitation is on stuff like that, but.
Ben Larue:
No, but liability is a big thing. Yeah, no, definitely.
Gil Illescas:
Huge, yeah.
Ben Larue:
Huge, huge. All right, so I figure all that out. What happens if the hard drive fails? I lose everything.
James Campbell:
That's where we get really into the trenches. We're going to [inaudible 00:17:00], but there's an option called RAID. Actually let me even go back a little bit. In the traditional NVR, most of the time it's going to record if you have two hard drives and it's going to record from hard drive number one, fill that up and then it's going to record hard drive number two, and it's going to fill that one up. Then it's going to go back to hard drive number one and start overriding that. So let's just say hard drive one starts to fail, all of the footage that's on hard drive number one is lost. Unless you do something called RAID or some form of backup, obviously. So we have an entire video on RAID that you can really go into and talk about the different levels.
But RAID protects you against certain hard drive failures. You can have situations where you have one hard drive fail and you don't lose a second of footage. If there's an option called RAID six, which allows you to lose two hard drives and it doesn't lose a second of footage, of course that requires additional hard drives to support that functionality. But for the most part then that's another really good reason to use surveillance grade drives because of all the importance in the system. This is one thing you can't really underestimate is, how important is that footage on your hard drive in the event that it's lost.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. And most recorders standard NVRs and DVRs, you can't hot swap them, which means, there's nothing that's going to keep recording as you switch out a bad hard drive. You're going to lose footage at that time. You're going to lose the footage of the bad hard drive and it's just going to have to swap it out and bite the bullet. So what James is talking about prevents that from happening, but it is a little bit more cost.
Ben Larue:
Yeah, which that's fair if you're getting that redundancy. Okay.
Gil Illescas:
Yep.
Ben Larue:
Makes sense. I get storage for traditional systems. It sounds like a lot. Like it's going to be a lot of money and a lot to figure out. Sounds like the cloud's going to be easier.
Gil Illescas:
No, not in my opinion.
James Campbell:
It really depends on the setup. Some of them, what's easier about the cloud, is it a [inaudible 00:19:13], you specify your days. You don't even think about the terabyte. The term terabytes not even used. You put in, I don't want to record for 60 days and then it's going to retain 60 days. The system's going to know. That's great, but cloud storage is a recurring cost. You buy your hard drives, you might spend $1,500 on hard drives, and then you go to cloud and you may be spending $300 a month for that equivalent amount of space. Then so in a couple months, all of a sudden you've gone from the cost of the hard drives and now you're going to have to retain that for as long as the footage is there and as long as you have your system basically. So it's definitely not a less expensive option. I want to make that very clear. Cloud storage is very expensive and it's complicated because then you have to figure out, how do I get the footage from my local business here to the cloud? How much-
Ben Larue:
That was going to be my next question.
James Campbell:
How fast is your upload speed. What kind of quality are they going to be able to send that in? There's a lot of factors there you really have to consider. So usually people-
Ben Larue:
I have to have my system connected to the internet for cloud storage.
James Campbell:
You do, yeah..
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, and you asked if it's easier, and I said, "No, not really." I guess it's easier when it comes to not even having to worry about anything as far as hardware's concerned. But as far as concerns over connectivity, loss of service, those things happen quite a bit.
James Campbell:
Your internet goes down, what happens?
Ben Larue:
I was going to say that.
James Campbell:
You might even have to pay for both that one time local fee and then also cloud. And that's really the smart way of doing, it's sort of called a hybrid cloud where you have local storage combined with some form of cloud storage, whether that's one to one in the cloud or more like a tying backup or maybe a lower quality backup in the cloud. There's billions of variations on it, of course. But yeah, you have to ask yourself very simply, what kind of internet connection do you have? How often is it going out and what happens when that does happen? Because there are some systems out there as well that if your internet goes out, you're screwed. You don't have footage during that time. They're kind of designed for people out in Silicon Valley who don't have any issues with internet ever. But if you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and you might have a little bit more occasional outages and stuff like that because the storms and stuff. It is something you really have to ask yourself if that's the smart thing to do, or if that's what you want to rely on really.
Gil Illescas:
I mean, everything's improving. So we might have this conversation five years from now and laugh at the fact that we used to store on site.
James Campbell:
Sure, yeah.
Ben Larue:
Yeah, that's a good point.
James Campbell:
I mean, internet speeds have gotten better in the US as time's gone on as well. When I was in tech support five years ago and doing that stuff daily, I knew how bad people's internet connection were, especially their uploads.
Gil Illescas:
Right.
James Campbell:
The speed that you can send video over to another place on the internet, and most of the time you couldn't send one camera there. Now we're getting to the point where maybe you can send one camera, maybe you can send two or three. It's getting better and it's always going to get better for that. So that's one of the big bottlenecks right now, I think for it. And then of course, the cost with it too. That's the other big bottleneck. It's never going to be probably more affordable. But there are going to be advantages to that over time.
Gil Illescas:
Yep. I agree.
Ben Larue:
That makes sense. I mean, it makes sense that's why we've been doing it on premise. I think there's also that notion of people being worried because the storage is so important. One of the main reasons in the system. What happens if it gets stolen? If [inaudible 00:23:07] gets stolen or something, can't that happen? Isn't that a thing or no?
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, I mean that's just it. Redundancies is basically as much as you want to pay for. You can be redundant on everything. You just got to be willing to pay for it. It's all out there. The ability to cover all these questions and what if this and what if that, it can all be covered. We can take care of any of it. It just costs. If you're willing to pay for it, the opportunity to have a fully redundant system with electrical network backup storage, everything is feasible. You just got to [inaudible 00:23:52].
Ben Larue:
Right, right.
James Campbell:
Couldn't have said it better. Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it.
Ben Larue:
That's such a good point. It's so true too. It's so true. That's good. Well, I covered a lot of my bases for storage. What do you all feel? How do you feel experts? What do we think? What are we missing? What are we not thinking about when it comes to storage?
Gil Illescas:
We gave it out there. I think we put it out there.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
I think we demystified.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of options out there and there's a lot of lingo you're going to find. There's a lot of terminology you might find, but if you're working with somebody, ask those questions. Feel free to ask them, what happens if my hard drive fails? And if you're concerned about that and they don't really have a good answer for you, maybe try to dig into a little bit more and see. Because doing a RAID setup isn't that much more in the long term. Your initial cost. You pay a couple more, buy one more hard drive basically for some of them. And then you've got redundancy in the case of any failure.
And that piece of mind is worth it for most people, once they realize that option's there. So if you ask those questions to whoever you're purchasing from or whoever, potentially might be installing your system, and if they can't give you an answer and you don't feel comfortable, start really digging in. Because your storage again, is your footage is the key, or that's what you bought your system for. So don't slack off in that aspect, I think is what I would say.
Ben Larue:
Definitely.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. I think two of the three redundant packages we've discussed are not as expensive as people think. They're a little bit more. The RAID we just talked about and having a backup for power. Some kind of UPS, uninterruptible power source. You have those two things. The third thing, which would be internet connectivity. It's hard to back that up. You hope that your internet service provider kind of does, and you have to check and see how good you are locally if you're on fiber or whatever. But other than that, at least two of the three main things we can do, and it's fairly cost effective if you want to.
James Campbell:
Yeah, we're talking a couple hundred dollars, we're not talking a couple thousand dollars to achieve a RAID and a back backup battery. And should be noted too, just in case anybody is kind of curious with an NVR system, unless you have it set up in a very interesting way. Most of ours were set up in a way where if internet goes down, it doesn't affect your actual video aspect of it, just means you won't be able to access it on your phone or somewhere remote in that case. So just want to make sure people didn't think that. If the internet goes down, the footage goes down. That might happen with cloud.
Gil Illescas:
That's right. Yeah.
James Campbell:
Depending on how they do it, but not with a traditional NVR or a hybrid cloud set up potentially as well.
Gil Illescas:
Great point. Internet going down only affects cloud storage. So we actually cover everything on site if we have a RAID and a backup battery for sure.
James Campbell:
Yep.
Ben Larue:
And that is one of the advantages of doing it with physical components and locally there. And there are other backup options too, by the way, besides just cloud, right.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
So that's important to know too.
Gil Illescas:
And some people double up with the on-camera storage too. Plenty of people do that. That's pretty [inaudible 00:27:13]
Ben Larue:
Yeah, on the camera directly. Yeah, right. With dusty cards and stuff. Yep.
James Campbell:
Yep.
Ben Larue:
Totally. Totally. That's awesome. And we'll have links to those videos, those separate videos like NAS devices, SD cards, built on storage, that stuff links and descriptions below. Be sure to check those out. Experts, unless I'm missing anything, I think that'll wrap this episode up.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah, we're good.
James Campbell:
We're good.
Gil Illescas:
Go get some storage people.
Ben Larue:
Heck yes. And ask the questions. Like James said, if you don't feel confident in the answer, make sure you make yourself feel confident, right?
James Campbell:
Absolutely.
Ben Larue:
So feel free to contact our support team, our sales team, with any questions you might have. We're happy to walk through any of this stuff with you and what our devices are capable of. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode, SCW, Myth Busters Storage. If you have any ideas, drop them in the comments below. Thanks so much.
James Campbell:
Thank you.
Gil Illescas:
Awesome.