Do all home surveillance systems record all the time?

This question was submitted by one of our readers, Ken Mills, who wanted to know if all home surveillance systems record all the time.

Video surveillance recording depends on whether your surveillance system has a video recorder (an old analog type video recorder or newer digital video recorder, which is also known as a DVR for short) and how it is setup.

If  your security cameras and system are just connected to a monitor which displays the area under surveillance in real-time, then your surveillance system won’t record video of events at all for playback.  This means that someone needs to be sitting at the monitor continuously watching the screen to actively perform surveillance.  If an event happens and someone didn’t see it occur in real-time while watching the monitor then there is no way to go back and see the event again.

If your security camera system does have a video recorder then you will be able to play back events for review.  This is for both analog video recorders and digital video recorders.  Analog video recorders use tapes like your standard VHS to record the view displayed on your cameras.  Digital video recorders record images from your security cameras onto a file on a computer hard drive which you can view to playback events in the camera views.

The longer your video recording system is set to record, the more VHS tapes you will need in the case of analog video recording, and the more hard drive space you will need for digital video recorders.  So if you set your system to record 24 hours a day and you want to archive the videos captured for long periods of time you’ll need a lot of tapes or a large hard drive space.

Most security camera video recording systems allow you to record only during certain times of the day.  So for example you can only have your surveillance system record between 10:00pm at night to 8:00am in the morning every day.  Also, in more advanced security surveillance systems, you can setup the system to only start recording when there is some sort of movement in the camera’s field of view.  With this type of setup you’ll have smaller video files which will also save on storage capacity space.

So the answer to your question is “No”, not all home surveillance systems record all the time.