A security recorder is a buffer, not an archive. Storage is finite, so the system keeps a rolling window and drops the oldest footage to make room for the newest. The recording of an incident exists until the window rolls past it, and then it exists nowhere. Nothing warns you on the day it goes.
The two clocks do not line up
Most buildings run a retention window measured in days or a couple of weeks. A tenancy dispute runs on a much slower clock. Tribunals Ontario reports that in each of the first three quarters of its 2025-26 year, 51 to 53 per cent of English language Landlord and Tenant Board cases fell inside the 90 day case lifecycle, against a target of 80 per cent. Filing also happens after the incident, not on the day of it. By the time you hold a hearing date, the footage you wanted has been written over several times.
Privacy rules push the window shorter, not longer
The reflex fix is to turn retention up to a year. That is the wrong direction. The federal privacy commissioner's guidance on overt video surveillance says recordings should only be kept as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose of the surveillance, and that recordings no longer required should be securely destroyed. Applicant files run the opposite way, where the exposure comes from keeping data too long.
The answer sits in the phrase "no longer required". Once there is an incident, that one clip is required. The rest of the week is not. So the fix is an export on the day you hear about the incident, while the footage is still there to export.
An export is not evidence until it plays
Getting the clip off the recorder is half the job. Ontario's Practice Direction on Evidence requires a party relying on a recording to be able to play it during the hearing so everyone can see or hear it, and states that the LTB will not provide the hardware or software needed to play it. Video uploaded to the Tribunals Ontario Portal has to be in an accepted format, MP4, MOV and AVI among them. Files sent by email are limited to PDF, Word, Excel, JPG, MP3, MP4 or MOV. Evidence cannot be delivered by cloud link, and iCloud and Dropbox are named. The material has to reach the other party at least 7 days before the hearing, or 5 days for responding materials.
Plenty of recorders export into a proprietary container with a player bundled alongside it. That file is not on the accepted list, will not open on a hearing laptop, and cannot be re-exported later because the source is gone. The formats and the deadlines differ by province. The pattern does not.
Four things to settle this week
- Open the recorder's settings and write down the retention window in days. Treat the installer's old answer as unverified, because a drive swap or an added camera changes the number.
- Do the same for door controller and fob access logs. They overwrite as well, often sooner, and they answer who entered and when, which corridor footage may not.
- Add one line to your incident intake: export the clip the same day, with ten minutes either side of the event.
- Export to MP4 or MOV, open it on a computer that has never had the camera software installed, and store the copy somewhere other than the recorder. If it will not play there, it is not evidence yet.
The question worth asking
Camera count and image sharpness say close to nothing about whether a building can prove anything. The better test: has anyone here ever exported a clip and played it on another machine? In most buildings that gets tried for the first time in the week someone needs it, which is the week it is too late.