“Just set it to 30 days” is the most common retention policy in small business — and it’s rarely a real decision. It’s a default. This guide is about making the decision on purpose: what to keep, why, and how to size the storage honestly.
Why retention matters
Footage is usually needed after something happens — an incident, a dispute, an insurance question, a police request. When that moment arrives, you don’t get to re-decide how much you kept. Retention is an insurance policy you pay for monthly with disk space instead of premiums.
The three factors
1. What kind of business are you?
- Retail, restaurants, bars: footage is evidence for disputes and liability — 30 days is a reasonable floor, 45–60 better if incidents are common.
- Warehouses, logistics: you’re investigating loss events that may surface weeks later — 60–90 days.
- Offices: 30 days is usually fine; the cameras are more about access control than liability.
- Anything regulated (healthcare, finance, certain retail): check your compliance requirements — some industries have specific retention minimums.
2. How fast do you actually review?
If nobody looks at footage until something happens, the review window is your real retention need. If incidents get reported within a week, 30 days covers you. If it takes a month to notice shrink, 30 days is already too short.
3. What does it cost?
Storage scales with cameras × resolution × frame rate × days. A 4-camera system at 2K, 15 fps costs roughly 6–8 GB per camera per day — call it 1 TB for 30 days. Going to 60 days isn’t 2× the cost; with proper sizing it’s often cheaper per day than you expect, and it buys real peace of mind.
Sizing UniFi Protect storage
UniFi Protect makes the math concrete: every camera has a recommended resolution and frame rate, and Protect shows you projected retention right in the UI based on your drive. Two practical levers:
- Resolution per camera, not per system. A 4K camera watching a parking lot is worth it; a 4K camera watching a hallway is wasted pixels. Drop hallway cams to 2K and retention stretches without losing anything that matters.
- Frame rate honestly. 15 fps is plenty for most scenes; 30 fps doubles storage for footage nobody watches frame-by-frame.
If you want the underlying math, our retention math explainer breaks down the per-camera numbers.
The practical recommendation
Start here, adjust when reality says otherwise:
- Office / low-risk: 30 days
- Retail / restaurant: 45–60 days
- Warehouse / logistics: 60–90 days
- Regulated industry: whatever your compliance requires, plus margin
Then verify monthly that retention is actually being met — drift is the quiet killer of footage you thought you had.
The takeaway
Retention is a decision about risk, not a storage setting. Pick the window that matches your business and your review habits, size the drive to it honestly, and check monthly that you’re still hitting it. That’s the whole discipline.
Not sure how your current system is set up? Run the 60-second Network Health Check — retention is one of the six things we score.