How Long Do Security Cameras Keep Footage?

The short answer

There are exactly two answers, and you choose which one applies to you at the checkout rather than in the app.

Local storage: footage is kept until the card or base station is full, then the oldest is overwritten. Retention is capacity divided by how much the camera writes. Nobody can turn that into a number of days for your camera without knowing the bitrate, and almost no maker publishes one.

Cloud storage: footage is kept for the window your plan buys, then deleted. Ring publishes up to 180 days of video playback on its paid tiers, which is the longest published window of any brand we cover. Stop paying and the window closes.

If you want footage that is still there in three weeks without paying anyone, buy a camera with a big card ceiling, set it to record on motion rather than continuously, and mount it where nobody can simply unscrew it and walk off with the card.

What each camera can actually hold

Two rows need reading carefully. Arlo publishes USB local storage up to 2TB on its Pro SmartHub, but its own support article states that local storage is a second location for recordings and cannot be used on its own as a substitute for cloud recording, and that only automatically triggered recordings save locally. And Ring’s camera has no local storage at all, which makes the plan window the entire answer for that brand. If retention without a subscription is your priority, those two rows are the ones that disqualify themselves.

The setting that matters more than the card

Continuous versus event recording changes retention by an order of magnitude, and it is a toggle rather than a purchase.

Continuous means every minute is written, so a 512GB card covers a fixed number of days and that is that. Wyze publishes 24/7 local recording for the Cam v4 and states you can choose Continuous or Events Only; TP-Link’s support pages say continuous recording needs a microSD card or a Tapo Hub, and that battery-powered cameras and doorbells do not support it at all.

Events only means the camera writes when something moves. The same card now covers weeks or months, at the cost of the gaps between clips. This is the only mode battery cameras have — eufy states that a battery-operated camera will not record continuously even when connected to a HomeBase — which is why a battery camera with a modest card often keeps a longer history than a wired camera with a big one.

Our guide to whether cameras record all the time covers the trade in full, and wired vs wireless cameras explains why the power source decides the recording mode rather than the other way round.

The three ways footage disappears before you look for it

The loop caught up with it. This is the normal one, and the reason to check your retention before you need it rather than after. If a two-week holiday is longer than your card lasts, switch to event recording or fit a bigger card.

The plan lapsed. Cloud footage lives inside a subscription. Ring publishes what the plans include and our guide to cameras without a subscription covers what happens the day you stop paying — which, for cloud-only cameras, includes the history you had already recorded.

Someone took the camera. The genuine weakness of local storage: a card inside a stolen camera leaves with it. This is the strongest argument for cloud recording, and it is also the argument for the way eufy builds its system — cameras send footage to a HomeBase indoors, so the storage is not on the wall. Mount cheap wired cameras high and out of reach, and read where to place security cameras before you drill.

The cameras to buy for long local retention

All four record to storage you own, with no monthly fee, and all four come from our no-subscription camera ranking. They are ordered here by how much footage they can hold rather than by picture quality.

One buying note that saves grief later: a camera recording continuously writes to its card constantly, so use a card rated for that duty rather than the cheapest one on the shelf, and buy the largest capacity the maker publishes rather than the largest you can find. If you are covering several rooms or a whole property, the best camera systems is the page that compares how storage scales, and eufy vs Arlo is the cleanest illustration of why two base stations that look alike are not the same deal.