Skip to content
TechnoGuru — Think Technology, Think TechnoGuru

— CCTV Storage · Retail

Retail store — 16 cameras, 30-day retention

Problem. A retail store with 16 4MP H.265 cameras needs 30 days of continuous recording for loss-prevention and incident review.

Answer. 16 cameras × 4MP H.265 × 25 fps × 30 days lands around 6–8 TB of usable storage. The calculator returns the raw figure; the BOQ rounds up for spare-disk and RAID overhead.

02 / In depth

How this preset reads — the engineering view.

Retail CCTV retention is regulatorily and operationally driven. 30 days is the practical minimum for loss-prevention investigations (covers a typical shrinkage-review cycle) and aligns with most insurer requirements for claim corroboration.

This preset assumes 16 cameras at 4MP H.265 with a 25 fps full-frame rate and motion-triggered recording. The calculator returns the storage envelope before RAID overhead — a real BOQ adds 30–40 % for RAID 5/6 redundancy and spare-disk space.

Bitrate is the dominant variable: H.265 is ~50 % more efficient than H.264, motion-only recording typically halves storage again, and dropping fps from 25 to 15 cuts another 40 %. The calculator lets you sweep each axis to find the cost-vs-evidence-quality trade.

Out of scope: VMS choice (Hikvision, Dahua, Milestone, Genetec), camera placement plan, network bandwidth at the switch (CCTV is the dominant traffic load on most retail LANs), and the lifecycle / AMC plan that determines failure-rate budgets for the disk array.

What this preset deliberately does not solve

  • RAID overhead adds 30–40 % to the raw storage figure.
  • H.265 vs H.264, fps and motion-triggered recording are the dominant compression variables.
  • Disk lifecycle (typically 5–7 years for enterprise NAS drives in continuous-write) is a separate TCO line.

How this preset differs from its siblings

The factory-90-day sibling preset configures continuous recording (industrial process audit requires full frames), more cameras, and a 3× longer retention window — the resulting storage envelope is an order of magnitude larger (≈145–150 TB vs 6–8 TB). This preset's distinguishing decisions are motion-triggered recording (acceptable for retail — most frames have no useful information) and the 30-day retention floor (matches insurance and loss-prevention norms). Different sector, different evidence requirement, different storage architecture.

03 / Hydrated calculator

Try the configuration — live.

The calculator below is preloaded with this preset’s state. Adjust any input — your URL stays shareable.

Loading the calculator…

· Other presets for cctv storage retention calculator

· Next

Brief us on the project — with this configuration.

Presets are a typology starting point. The brief wizard captures the room geometry, programme and constraints we need to translate this configuration into a real design.

Open in the toolSend the brief