Whether you’re deploying a new surveillance system or optimizing an existing one, the decisions you make around storage, bandwidth, retention, and redundancy have long-lasting consequences – on cost, resilience, and your ability to recover when things go wrong. At Tiger Surveillance, we work through these challenges every day with our customers, and we’ve compiled some of the most common – and most important – questions we encounter into this practical guide.
From configuring your VMS for multi-year retention to understanding the real trade-offs of cloud storage tiers, here are five things you should know.
1. Long-Term Retention: Get the Configuration Right From Day One
When retention periods extend beyond 90 days, the way your VMS is configured becomes critically important – both for controlling costs and minimizing recovery time after a disaster.
The reason comes down to two factors. First, the sheer volume of files accumulated over extended periods directly impacts how long re-indexing and recovery takes. Second, most VMS platforms rely on a database to track stored files, and a large number of small files places significantly more strain on that database than fewer, larger files. Configuring your VMS to produce fewer, larger files reduces that pressure and meaningfully shortens the time it takes to bring a recovery server back online.
Getting this right from the start matters – the decisions made at deployment can have a lasting impact on both operational costs and long-term resilience. This is one of the areas where Tiger can make a real difference. Our team has the expertise to guide you through the optimal configuration for your specific retention requirements, so your system is built for both efficiency and recovery confidence from day one.
2. How Much Free Disk Space Should You Keep Locally?
The local disk plays a critical role: it’s the interface between your VMS and the cloud. Surveillance Bridge continuously replicates files as they’re written to disk and, once confirmed in the cloud, replaces each original file with a lightweight stub – freeing up local space in the process.
While Bridge itself requires very little local storage to operate, it’s essential that the local disk maintains a minimum of 3 days of recordings at all times, with 7 days being the ideal target. Here’s why: your VMS won’t stop recording if internet connectivity is lost, which means data will continue to accumulate locally until the cloud connection is restored and Bridge can resume replication.
Internet outages can come from many sources – scheduled cloud provider maintenance, a failed switch, a blocked port, or an account in poor standing. Without enough local headroom to absorb that downtime, you risk running out of disk space before connectivity is restored, potentially losing recordings entirely. Thoughtful buffer sizing is a simple but critical step toward uninterrupted coverage.
3. How Much Bandwidth Do You Need to Reach the Cloud?
One of the great advantages of cloud object storage is that it’s infinitely scalable – in both capacity and performance – so there’s no need to worry about overwhelming it with data. The bottleneck, if one exists, is almost always on the upload side of your local network.
When planning bandwidth, the key consideration is ensuring that Surveillance Bridge can replicate data fast enough to maintain your local buffer target (see point 2 above). This depends on your camera count, resolution, frame rate, and compression settings. A Tiger engineer can help you calculate the right upload capacity for your specific deployment to ensure continuous replication without straining your network.
4. Which Cloud Storage Class Is Right for You?
The major first-tier cloud platforms – AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google, IBM, and others – offer a wide range of storage classes, and selecting the right one can have a significant impact on cost. Performance is largely consistent across standard and infrequent-access tiers; the differences come down to minimum retention periods, per-operation costs, and retrieval fees.
Archive tiers introduce an additional consideration: retrieval times can range from several minutes to several hours. These tiers are well-suited for long-term storage but less ideal for footage that needs to be readily accessible. As a general rule, more expensive tiers offer shorter minimum stay requirements, lower operation costs, and reduced retrieval fees.
What makes this genuinely complex is that calculating the true cost of cloud storage for a given workflow is extraordinarily difficult – the interplay of all these variables makes it virtually impossible to estimate without purpose-built modeling tools. That’s exactly why we developed models that take the guesswork out of the equation and deliver realistic, workflow-specific cost estimates. Reach out to us and we’ll help you identify the optimal storage class for your requirements.
5. Bandwidth Controls in Surveillance Bridge: A Trade-Off Worth Understanding
Surveillance Bridge typically shares network resources with other administrative and operational systems rather than having dedicated bandwidth. Since upload capacity is finite, we regularly receive requests to configure Bridge in ways that won’t impact the rest of the network. The good news is that we offer two controls to manage this: the ability to schedule the number of active upload threads, and the ability to set an upper limit on bandwidth usage.
However, these controls come with an important trade-off. The primary reason most customers deploy Surveillance Bridge is for disaster recovery – specifically, to protect recordings in the event of a total server failure. Scheduling replication to off-hours only, or throttling uploads during the day, introduces replication delays. If a server fails mid-day, the most recent and often most critical footage – potentially including recordings that explain why it failed – may not yet have been safeguarded.
For this reason, we always work with customers to find the right balance between network performance and recording protection, ensuring that the most valuable footage is never left at risk.
Ready to optimize your surveillance deployment?
Contact the Tiger Surveillance team – we’re here to help you build a system that’s efficient, resilient, and built for the long term.