How much storage do you need for 30 days of footage?

Four rules of thumb, then the arithmetic. Resolution, frame rate, compression and how much movement the camera sees are what actually decide the number.

A 4MP camera recording continuously at 15fps with H.265 uses roughly 25 to 35 GB a day. Four of those is about 120 GB a day, which is 3.6 TB for thirty days. A 4 TB surveillance drive covers it; a 2 TB drive gives you about a fortnight.

Motion-only recording cuts that by half or better on a quiet property, and by almost nothing on a shopfront facing a busy street. Do not plan around the best case.

Use a surveillance-rated drive, not a desktop one. Surveillance drives are built for continuous writes from several streams at once, which is exactly the workload that kills a desktop drive in a year.

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