Policies and groups

A recording policy is a named bundle of retention settings: which storage tier to write to, a size cap, a minimum time to keep, and optionally an absolute maximum retention cap that applies regardless of size. Every camera has a policy, cloned from a default (or a group's policy) at the moment the camera is created.

Camera groups

Cameras can be organized into groups, and a group can carry its own policy, applied to every camera in it. This is how you run, for example, an "always record" group for cameras where continuous footage matters and a "motion only" group for lower-priority cameras, adding both kinds of camera in the same discovery batch and assigning each to its group as you go.

Groups support inheritance, so a policy set at the group level applies to every member without having to configure each camera individually, while still allowing a specific camera's policy to be overridden if it needs to differ from its group.

Size caps and the absolute retention cap

Two different enforcement mechanisms apply, and they interact deliberately:

• Per-tier retention (a size cap and/or a minimum keep-time) governs the normal eviction sweep, and it skips footage that's been moved to an archive tier, the archiver owns deleting that footage once its own window has passed.
• The absolute maximum retention cap is a hard ceiling that overrides that scoping on purpose: if set, it removes footage older than the configured number of days regardless of whether it's live or archived. It's off by default (no surprise pruning on an existing install), and it can only ever make footage disappear sooner than the other settings would, never later.

A protected bookmark is exempt from both, see Bookmarks.