Security Camera Storage & Retention Calculator
Surveillance storage planning for business camera systems.
Security Camera Storage & Retention Calculator
Estimate surveillance storage from your camera count, bitrate, recording schedule, and retention target. The result is a planning estimate, not a system design or guaranteed storage figure.
Echelon Technologies designs and installs business security-camera and surveillance systems, including camera placement, networking, recording, storage, remote access, and retention planning.
Camera profile
Start with the number of cameras and the video profile you expect to record.
Recording and retention
Motion and event recording depends on how often each camera is expected to record. Use an editable percentage instead of a fixed reduction.
For continuous recording this is 100%. For motion or event recording, enter your own expected recording percentage.
Bitrate and headroom
Suggested bitrates are planning estimates for convenience and can be overridden. Actual bitrate varies substantially based on camera model, scene complexity, motion, lighting, codec settings, frame rate, resolution, and other configuration.
Current planning estimate: 4.0 Mbps per camera.
Edit this field to override the planning estimate.
Add planning room for storage overhead, formatting, system behavior, and future adjustment. Set to 0% to remove the allowance.
What can change the real storage requirement?
Use this result as a planning estimate. A final design should validate the actual cameras, recorder, storage architecture, and retention expectations.
Keep the assumptions with the estimate
The storage number is only useful when the camera count, resolution, FPS, codec, recording percentage, retention target, bitrate, and headroom are kept with it.
Need help validating surveillance storage?
Planning a business camera system? Echelon Technologies can help validate camera coverage, recording, networking, and storage requirements.