¶ How long we keep your recordings
WebDisk CVR does not delete recordings "after so many days". It deletes the oldest ones when your storage starts running out of room for new material — so how far back your archive reaches is decided by the size of the storage you bought, not by the number of days you had in mind.
¶ The rule that matters most
⚠️ You don't set us to "30 days". You buy room for 30 days.
Your cameras record on their own, footage keeps arriving without any help from you, and your storage fills up by itself. When it runs out of room, we delete the oldest recordings so that today's will fit. If you buy storage that holds nine days, your archive will reach back nine days — whatever you declared.
Why do we delete the oldest material instead of simply refusing to save more? Because full storage loses current recordings — last night's footage, the one you are about to ask for. Losing the oldest material hurts less than losing what is happening right now.
¶ How we know how fast your footage arrives
The same percentage means something completely different for two customers: with 100 GB of storage, 3% free is about three hours of footage; with 10 TB, it is more than a week. That is why we don't look at the percentage alone — we measure your rate.
- Every day we add up how much material arrived in your storage over each 24-hour period.
- We take the last 14 days and work out the daily average from them.
- We count only the days on which something actually arrived. Days with no material are skipped.
That third point looks like a detail, but it is the crucial one. If your recorder had been connected for three days and we divided the total by fourteen, the average would come out five times too low — and we would leave you five times too little free space. Recordings would start disappearing into write errors before anyone noticed. Underestimating the rate is more dangerous here than overestimating it, so we deliberately err on the cautious side.
💡 We only calculate the rate once we have at least two days with material. For the first days after you connect a recorder, the percentage thresholds decide on their own — the "Safety net" section below describes them.
¶ How much free space we keep, and when deletion starts
Knowing your rate, what we watch is not "is the storage full" but will there be somewhere to save tomorrow's footage.
| Figure | What it comes to | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| The buffer we try to maintain | 1.5 days of your incoming footage | this is how much free space we want to keep at all times |
| The threshold at which we start deleting | 1.0 day of your incoming footage | when less than this is free, we remove the oldest recordings |
| Buffer ceiling | 25% of the storage capacity | the buffer will never take up more than a quarter of your storage |
Three things worth reading out of that table:
- We delete early, not at the last moment. We start while a full day's buffer is still there. We check the state of your storage every hour, but if one check were to fail, or if we had to catch up after a break in connectivity, that day of buffer gives us the margin.
- We delete straight back to the full buffer, that is, to 1.5 days. Otherwise we would come back every hour to delete another sliver.
- Always oldest first. We work forward from the oldest recording and remove exactly as much as is needed to recover the buffer — not one clip more.
The 25% ceiling protects you from an absurdity: if your cameras sent more in a day than the whole storage holds, the instruction "keep 1.5 days free" would mean "keep the storage empty". In that case we keep as much free as we can, the service carries on working, and you get an email telling you how many hours your storage realistically covers.
¶ Safety net — the percentage thresholds
Alongside the rate-based calculation, ordinary occupancy thresholds are also at work. They decide when we don't yet know your rate (the first days after a recorder is connected, or a return after a long break), and beyond that they keep an eye on us in case the rate suddenly jumps.
| Threshold | Value | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Warning | 90% occupancy | we send you an email, even if the buffer measured in days is still sufficient |
| Deletion | 97% occupancy | we delete, even if there is more than a day of buffer left |
| Target level | 85% occupancy | this is what we come down to when we don't yet know your rate |
¶ The email comes first, deletion second
Before we delete a single recording, you get an email at your account's contact address. It contains:
- your storage occupancy as a percentage,
- the measured rate — how much material your cameras send per day,
- how much footage the whole storage covers at that rate,
- a button taking you straight to increasing your storage in WebDisk Files.
We warn you in advance — usually when less than three days' worth of incoming footage is left free, or when occupancy has passed 90%. Deletion only begins after an email that genuinely went out, and never in the same run that sent it. If mail delivery is not working, we do not delete. We send a reminder at most once every seven days, so as not to bury you in the same message.
⚠️ One exception: from 99% occupancy we delete without waiting for a warning. With storage that is effectively full, losing current recordings is a certainty, and there is no way to deliver the email in time anyway. In this one situation, deletion may happen without notice, or at the same moment as it.
¶ When we suspend incoming footage instead of deleting
There are two storage settings in WebDisk Files under which deleting older recordings would not free a single byte — it would be pure loss of material:
- overwrite protection (WORM / Anti-Ransomware) — the storage simply will not let a file be deleted before the set period has passed,
- versioning — deleting a file leaves its previous version behind, so no space is recovered.
In both cases we do the same thing: we delete nothing and suspend the intake of new recordings. If you turned on overwrite protection, you did it so that nobody — us included — would remove your recordings. Respecting that means stopping the service, not working around your own safeguard.
What that looks like in practice:
- In the panel, on the Storage tab, that storage gets an "intake suspended" marker, with a sentence giving the reason below the table.
- The account your recorder uses to send files is disabled. The recorder will get a login error — a clear signal, which it will usually report and retry. That is better than a transfer accepted and cut off halfway, after which the recording quietly vanishes.
- Recordings stop arriving. The material already in storage is left untouched.
- You get an email explaining what to do.
⚠️ Suspension means you lose the current footage instead of the oldest. That is the opposite of ordinary retention, and usually not what you want. If you are bound by a time limit ("we keep footage for 30 days"), do not turn on overwrite protection on your CVR storage — a seven-year lock and a declared "30 days" are a contradiction that cannot be satisfied.
Recovery is automatic. Once you increase your storage in Files (or turn versioning off there), at the next check — that is, within the hour — we lift the suspension ourselves and switch the recorder accounts back on. You don't need to ask anyone. The condition is a double one: occupancy below 90% and the full buffer restored. A little space appearing is not enough on its own.
¶ Situations in which we don't delete at all
| Situation | What we do |
|---|---|
| Your storage was filled by your other files, and removing the entire CCTV archive still would not free the space required | we delete nothing and write to you — deleting would be a pure loss of recordings without solving the problem |
| The material was put into storage by your NAS (directory import) | we never rotate it; anything deleted would come back at the next replication, and we would delete it again. You still get the same warning about space running out — the decision is yours |
| We could not measure your storage occupancy | we do nothing: we neither delete nor lift a suspension. A missing measurement is not the same thing as empty storage |
| The storage has no capacity limit purchased | there is nothing to exceed, so there is no basis for removing anything |
⚠️ One storage means one shared retention. We delete the oldest material across the whole storage, not separately for each recorder. If two sites write to the same storage, the rate of one shortens the archive of the other. Want each site's archive depth to be independent? Give them separate storage in Files.
¶ How much capacity do I need for 30 days?
Don't guess — read your own rate from the panel. Statistics appear after the first day of recording.
- Sign in at
cvr.webdisk.ioand go to the Storage tab. - Find your storage in the list of connected storage and click the statistics button in the last column.
- A summary of four items opens out — you want the first: Daily growth.
What each item tells you:
| Item | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Daily growth | how much material your cameras send on an average day |
| Archive reaches back to | the date of the oldest recording and how many days you have right now |
| Space retention keeps free | how much free space we are trying to maintain |
| Storage occupancy | the occupancy percentage and the time of the last measurement |
Now do the sum:
capacity needed ≈ daily growth × (the number of days you want + 1.5)
The extra day and a half is the buffer that retention will not give back.
An example. The panel shows daily growth of 40 GB / 24 h and you want 30 days:
40 GB × 31.5 = 1.26 TB. Buy 1 TB and you will realistically come down to about 23 days — below your own declaration.
Add two more allowances on top of that figure:
- For changes to the installation and for seasonality. An extra camera, a switch to a higher resolution, or a switch from motion detection to continuous recording can double your growth overnight. Check "Daily growth" after every change to the cameras.
- For exporting footage. A ZIP package built from a selected range is created in your storage and takes up space a second time, alongside the material it was built from, for the full three days the link stays valid. With tight storage we will refuse to build the package rather than eat into the retention buffer — which means that at the critical moment you will not be able to export your evidence. Details: Sharing recordings.
⚠️ Two caveats about the statistics that you need to know.
First: they count only the material we rotate ourselves. Material from a directory import (a NAS writing straight into storage) is excluded — so if you have a NAS as well as a recorder, "Daily growth" is lower than the real rate at which your storage fills, and the capacity you calculate from it will be too small. With directory import alone, the panel will say "No statistics yet", even though material is arriving.
Second: the panel always works out "Space retention keeps free" as 1.5 × growth, without the 25% ceiling. If your storage holds less than roughly six days of incoming footage, the actual reserve is smaller than the figure shown.
¶ Why this is your responsibility as the data controller
If you have put up a sign at the entrance or published a privacy notice saying "recordings are kept for 30 days", then it is on you to make that true. And it will only be true if you buy capacity in which 30 days fits. Storage that holds nine days makes your own statement to the people being recorded untrue — and that is not a problem at our end, because you choose the capacity and can change it in Files at any time.
Two practical tips:
- Word the sentence in your notice honestly. The GDPR allows you to give criteria instead of a fixed number, for example: "up to 30 days, after which recordings are deleted automatically, oldest first, as the system fills up".
- Don't write "overwritten" — that describes the loop inside a recorder. CVR deletes files, and only when space runs out.
The full description of your duties, ready-made wording for notices, and a checklist to work through before you switch your CCTV on: Duties of a CCTV data controller (Polish only). The mechanism itself, in contractual language — chapter 4 of the CVR Terms of Service (Polish only); the split of roles in processing personal data — the data processing agreement (Polish only).
¶ Your archive is shallower than you want — what to do
- Increase your storage in WebDisk Files. This is the only thing that genuinely lengthens your archive. You buy capacity separately from the CVR subscription (PLN 45 net per month per recorder), so you can change it independently. In the panel, on the Storage tab, there is a Buy storage in Files button.
- Reduce the inflow. Motion-triggered recording instead of continuous, a lower resolution, or a lower frame rate on the cameras watching the less important spots.
- Split sites across separate storage if the rate of one is eating the other's archive.
- Download evidence and secure it outside CVR. Creating a link or selecting a range does not protect a recording from deletion — when space runs out, retention will remove that material too. Download the file and keep it yourself.
⚠️ Pay attention to point four: there is no such thing in CVR as a "protected recording". If someone submits a request to restrict processing, or a case is under way, the only effective route is to download the material out of the Service.