The storage capacity required for archiving depends entirely on the amount of recordings you plan to keep, and on how long you want to keep them (retention time). Some organizations want to keep archived recordings from a large number of cameras for several months or years. Other organizations may only want to archive recordings from one or two cameras, and they may want to keep their archives for much shorter periods of time.
You should always first consider the storage capacity of the local drive containing the default archiving directory to which archived recordings are always moved, even though they may immediately after be moved to an archiving location on another drive. Basically, the capacity of the local drive should be at least twice the size required for storing the databases of all cameras.
When you archive, the system automatically checks that space required for the data to be archived plus 1 GB of free disk space per camera is available at the archiving location. If not, the archive location's oldest data from the relevant camera is deleted until there is sufficient free space for the new data to be archived.
When you estimate storage capacity required for archiving, consider your organization's needs, then plan for worst case rather than best case scenarios.
Tip: The Storage Calculator in the Support section of the Milestone website can help you determine the storage capacity required for your surveillance system.
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