Archive records and retains video, then steps its quality down as it ages instead of deleting it. Last week stays pristine. Last year stays watchable. The storage bill stops tracking the calendar.
On top of that sits analysis and search, so retrieving one clip out of months of recording does not mean scrubbing through months of recording.
Schedule Demo Read the Technical BriefA recording and retention layer for camera video, built around the observation that footage does not need the same fidelity at six months as it did on the first afternoon.
Retention policy in most organizations is a fight between legal, operations, and whoever signs off on storage. Legal wants everything kept. Operations wants everything searchable. Finance wants the invoice to stop growing. The usual resolution is a hard deletion date, which satisfies nobody and occasionally destroys the one clip somebody needed in month seven.
Archive takes a different route. Recent footage is held at original resolution because that is what an active investigation needs. As it ages it is transcoded down in steps, so a clip from last quarter is still there, still searchable, still watchable, at a fraction of the bytes. Nothing is deleted to save space, and typical deployments see storage requirements fall by around eighty percent while all of the content remains accessible.
Storage can be on premise, in the cloud, or split between them with policy driven migration. Analysis runs over the footage as it is recorded, so search is by what is in the video rather than by timestamp alone.
Each step is a scheduled transcode, applied automatically by age and by how important the footage was marked. The clip stays in place and stays retrievable throughout.
Typical storage reduction across a full retention period
Of retained content remains accessible and searchable
Ask an agency how long they keep video and you get a number that arrived from a legal opinion. Ask how it was chosen and you usually find it was negotiated downward until the storage quote became survivable. Thirty days is rarely a considered position on evidentiary value.
In the first week, video supports an active investigation: identifying a vehicle, reading a plate, establishing a sequence in detail. By month two the same clip is almost always doing a different job, which is corroboration that something happened, roughly when and roughly how. That question does not need full resolution.
Archive holds footage at original quality while it is still doing forensic work, then steps it down on a schedule as its role changes. Because each step is a multiple rather than a subtraction, a full retention period typically lands around eighty percent below flat storage. The clip never leaves the archive and never leaves the index, which is the difference between a lower resolution answer and no answer at all.
Under a hard thirty day policy the footage is gone, and there is no arguing with a scheduled job that ran correctly. Under quality tiering the clip is still there at archive resolution, still searchable by what is in it rather than by timestamp, and still exportable with its audit trail intact. The storage cost of keeping it that long is a fraction of what flat retention would have been.
Related: WINK Forge for the recording path, WINK Media Router for access control, and the resources library for storage sizing and retention configuration.
Send us your camera count and current retention period and we will work through the storage math with you.
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