Block 5. Storage and Scale

1

How Surveillance Storage Works: The Retention Math

Size surveillance storage with one formula: bitrate × 10.8 × cameras × retention days. See the math, bitrate table, RAID overhead, and retention limits.

2

Recording Strategies: Continuous, Motion, Event, and Scheduled

The four CCTV recording modes — continuous, motion, event, and scheduled — what each costs in storage, the clips you risk missing, and how to mix them.

3

Storage Tiers: Hot, Warm, Cold, and Archive

Hot, warm, cold, and archive storage tiers for surveillance video — what each costs per terabyte, the lifecycle policy that moves footage, and the traps.

4

On-Prem Storage Architecture: NVR, SAN, NAS, and RAID

On-prem surveillance storage explained: DAS, NAS, and SAN topologies, the RAID levels that survive a disk failure, and how to size for sustained writes.

5

Cloud and Hybrid Storage for Surveillance

Cloud and hybrid surveillance storage explained: the upload-bandwidth wall, the egress and retrieval cost trap, and when cloud beats local disks.

6

Retention Policy: How Long to Keep Footage, and Why

How long to keep CCTV footage: the operational and legal minimum, the GDPR privacy maximum, sector rules, deletion mechanics, and legal holds.

7

Federation: Managing Many Sites and Many Servers as One

How a federated VMS runs many sites as one: record at the edge, stream on demand, keep each site autonomous — and why federation is vendor-locked.

8

Scaling a VMS: Capacity Planning and the Storage Reference Design

VMS capacity planning, end to end: size recording servers by throughput, storage for capacity and write rate, plus the headroom and redundancy to add.