Surveillance Recording Retention Calculator · Storage planning

Recording retention calculator

Estimate how many days of footage your NVR can keep given camera count, storage volume, resolution, and recording schedule.

Recording parameters
Choose which stream to record. Only the selected stream counts toward storage.

Variable — averages lower on static scenes

24 h

Mainstream

High-quality recording stream

Recording
15 fps

Substream

Lower-res stream for live view / mobile

10 fps

Adds ~96 kbps per camera

Estimated retention
8 cameras · 8 TB · H.265 · VBR
3.9 months

119.5 days · 2,868 hours

mainstream (recorded)0.77 Mbps · 8.37 GB/day
substream (not recorded)0.19 Mbps
Per camera total0.77 Mbps · 8.37 GB/day
All cameras / day66.9 GB
Usable storage8000 GB

Days vs. cameras

Calibrated (Jun 2026) against measured on-disk recordings from 24 deployed cameras across 5 stores. Estimates are intentionally a touch conservative — they lean toward over-estimating storage (and under-estimating retention), so you're unlikely to run out of disk sooner than predicted. Real-world bitrate varies with scene motion and encoder tuning; treat the result as a planning figure, not a guarantee.