CCTV is a great way to protect your property against all manner of invaders, whether they be vandals, thieves, or trespassers. CCTV works to protect your property in a number of ways; it discourages invaders from attempting to come onto your property, it can serve as evidence if an event does occur, and it gives you peace of mind as you know that you’re well protected.
Depending on what CCTV system you have installed, how many cameras you have, and how much space you’re covering, the retention of all this footage could take up a lot of storage space. As such, it’s routine for places with CCTV systems to periodically dispose of old footage to make room for new footage, quite often automatically or on a timer.
If you have a CCTV system installed or are looking to get one, you might have found yourself wondering how long should the CCTV recordings be kept for?
How Long Should CCTV Footage Be Stored?
Generally, it’s advised to keep CCTV footage for 31 days. If your property is particularly low risk, it may also be acceptable to keep footage for 14 days. Naturally if you have some incident on your property, you’ll want to ensure that all of the relevant footage is extracted, saved, and stored for reference at later periods. If you wish to be additionally cautious, you might also want to save the footage from the surrounding dates as a precaution.
There is no officially mandated or regulated time regarding how long you should retain CCTV footage for, so essentially, it’s really up to you how long you decide to keep it for. As mentioned above, the average suggested period to retain CCTV footage for is one month. Some systems can only keep footage for 24 hours, which may be the only suitable option if your system doesn’t have the capabilities to store more than this amount of footage. If possible, we would strongly recommend that you store recordings for a longer period of time.
There are a wide number of reasons that this is the recommended course of action. For example, you don’t always know that an incident has occurred immediately after it is happened, and may unknowingly delete important footage without realising its value. Some systems have protocols that automatically erase the footage after set periods of time to make sure there’s space to record and store new footage. If you have one of these systems (or are thinking of getting one), in the event of an incident, make sure that you save the footage before it’s erased!
CCTV footage can be incredibly useful for a number of reasons, for example, if it meets certain quality standards, CCTV is admissible in court as evidence. If an event does occur on your property, your CCTV footage my be invaluable.
If you think your property may benefit from a CCTV system but would like a more in-depth and personalised analysis of how, IDS Security offer FREE security surveys. An engineer will come to your property and conduct an examination and give a bespoke recommendation as to what security solution would work best for your unique requirements.
Free Security Survey
If you have any questions about our CCTV supply and installation, or about how CCTV can help protect your property, reach out and contact us today. Our first-class team will be happy to advise you and answer any questions you may have.
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