The question we hear from bars, shops and property managers isn't "are the cameras good?" It's "why does the footage from last Thursday already not exist?" The answer is nearly always the recorder: one drive, no protection, and a few days of space, quietly overwriting itself.
The math
Footage size depends on resolution, frame rate and how the camera compresses it. Rough, useful numbers:
- 1080p, continuous, typical settings: about 20 to 40 GB per camera per day.
- 4K, continuous: two to four times that.
- Motion-only recording: often a third of continuous, sometimes less, depending on how busy the view is.
- Newer compression (H.265): roughly halves the number for the same picture.
Worked example
Eight 1080p cameras, continuous, 30 GB a day each: 240 GB a day, about 7 TB for 30 days. Keep 60 days and you want about 15 TB of usable space. Add a drive's worth for protection so one failure doesn't take the footage, and a four-drive recorder with 16 TB drives in one-drive parity (about 48 TB usable) keeps that same system for months.
Twelve 4K cameras continuous is a different machine: a rack chassis with twelve bays and two-drive parity, because at that size a second drive failing during a rebuild is a real risk.
Why the bundled recorder fails
- One drive, no redundancy. When it dies, everything on it is gone, and it will die; recorders write all day, every day.
- A few days of room. By the time you learn something happened, it's overwritten.
- No alerts. It fails on a Tuesday and you find out when you need it.
- Default passwords and open ports. Camera recorders are a favorite way into a business network, and a favorite thing to find exposed on the internet.
What we build instead
A recorder that keeps weeks, survives a dead drive, is reachable from your phone through a private connection instead of an open port, and is watched every five minutes so a failing drive is a scheduled swap. It records the cameras you already have. See the camera recorder, or size your own.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.