Thoughts on security system that saves video to DVR vs the cloud

i think costco sells some bundles but kork, tigerwise, and VAbuckeye are your spirit animals here.

eta i went from diy to ring because at the time foscam was a dumpster fire and you had to practically learn how to code to get it working...for 10 minutes until it broke again.

i am sure there are much easier solutions now.

For real security always get hard-wired PoE cameras with DVR for local storage. As you mentioned, this makes your data more secure as in your data belongs to you, but also it is less secure because as you also mentioned the hardware could go bad or be stolen. You can mitigate some of the risk by choosing a DVR that can take more than one hard drive. This duplicates your data to protect against hard drive failure, though obviously it will cost more. And you can hide or otherwise physically secure the device.

Some of the advantages of hard-wired cameras with local storage:

Full resolution recording 24/7 with no fees. Most of the cloud cams with free storage only record on motion, the length of clips is limited, and some even have a "cooldown" period between events. They miss a lot. Full time recording to the cloud costs a lot.

Wifi is finicky. It is subject to interference which can reduce speeds or drop the connection altogether, which obviously impacts video quality.

If your internet connection goes down, you're still recording.

If you scale up to 4/6/8/10 cameras, it requires a LOT of bandwidth, so much that many home internet plans just can't upload it all with full time recording. For reference, standard HD video can burn through 1GB or more per hour per camera. With only 4 cameras many people will hit their 1TB monthly cap in around a week. It could also completely saturate the total upload capacity for many users, which means video just won't get saved. 4K cameras makes it several times worse. You need gigabit upload and uncapped internet for cloud cams to match the capacity of local storage, and your ISP needs to maintain the speed through high use periods.

You can record through power outages by adding a UPS to power your router and NVR, which will in turn power your cameras. This will also give you surge protection.

You can get all the same features like person/vehicle detection, notifications, two-way talk, etc. Many vendors even have doorbell cameras that integrate with the NVR just like any other camera.



Get some quotes from local security and/or low voltage wiring companies.

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I had a position at LSU during grad school where part of my responsibility was managing the DVRs. I would strongly suggest not going the DVR route. Our equipment broke all of the time, the drives would not last long, even the surveillance grade drives, though I believe they have gotten a lot better.

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Stuckinthe90s

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I kid.


Yeah any drive can fail at any time, but modern surveillance drives are really good. Generally if they last a month they're going to run for years.

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I would explore would be setting up a VMS on Azure, connecting your IP cams to that and archiving your footage there under your own security configurations as opposed.

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No offense, but this sounds really terrible. This is building your own cloud video service, so it has all the downsides of that, and in addition it requires a lot of technical knowledge and it will cost 10X more. The video storage alone would cost something like $18/mth per terabyte, and that's not including the cost to run the VM. Then what video recording/management software are we using? Mobile app? How do we handle push notifications? Motion/person detection?

I love reinventing the wheel unnecessarily, and even I wouldn't think about doing this. Sounds like way more to manage and fix than just swapping out an $80 hard drive every 5-10 years. Hell I could keep a whole second NVR on standby for less than the cost of 1 year of Azure, and in the meantime I would get better quality video, longer retention, and everything would just work.

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What is the general consensus about cloud based security video vs DVR based security video?

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It really depends on your risk profile. If I had a lot to lose, like I owned a valuable website, or even if I had valuable information, such as access to the real identity of potentially powerful people that made posts anonymously they'd never make publicly on my valuable website, I'd probably need to worry about security and should keep the internal camera footage of how my neighbor pays me back for borrowing toilet paper on a local DVR so it's not used against me as leverage.

Just sayin.