Condominium CCTV Not Recording: How to Find Out Why.

What should the committee do before anyone diagnoses anything?

A Joint Management Body (JMB) or Management Corporation (MC) should first secure surviving footage. A digital recorder running continuously “can only retain video on the system for a set period before it is overwritten”, says the UK Home Office’s 2009 CCTV Operational Requirements Manual, so each day spent on diagnosis can cost footage.

1. Note what is needed: which cameras, which date, and a window well before and after the incident.
2. Protect the files. Some recorders can lock recorded files against overwriting, as one Hikvision manual describes.
3. Export in the native format, “without converting between formats” (Home Office manual), with the original metadata. A phone video of the monitor is not an export.
4. Let nobody initialise or replace a disk first. Initialisation removes all the data on the disk, yet that manual advises it for a disk reported as Abnormal.
5. Record who touched the recorder. The Singapore Police Force’s building standard, not Malaysian law, recommends an audit trail of access to recorders, including file retrieval.

The wider method is in When a Building’s Security System Starts Failing.

What does the pattern of missing CCTV footage point to?

The pattern of missing CCTV footage points to the failed part: one camera to that camera or its cabling, all cameras to the recorder or its disks, event clips only to the recording mode, and nothing older than a few days to overwriting or an expiry setting.

A network gap may be recoverable where edge storage was set up: the Singapore standard notes most modern IP cameras can record to onboard SD cards, and says the recorder “should be configured to automatically retrieve the loss of recording once the network has recovered”. And retention is a setting as much as a disk size: a Hikvision recorder deletes a file once its set expiry time is reached. How long to keep belongs in the scope of works for a CCTV tender. An intercom fault is read the same way.

Why can the guardhouse monitor show live CCTV when nothing was recorded?

The guardhouse monitor can show live CCTV with nothing recorded because live view and recording are separate jobs: the recorder can stop writing while the picture continues. The UK Home Office manual warns there “could be a substantial difference” between recorded and live quality.

Disks fail at a measured rate: Backblaze reported an annualised failure rate of 1.36% across 344,196 data-centre hard drives in 2025. The answer is detection. One Hikvision recorder manual lists an HDD Error exception for a disk writing error or an unformatted disk, and describes S.M.A.R.T. and bad sector detection and exportable logs of operations, alarms and exceptions. An alert helps only if somebody receives it.

Will the footage hold up with the police or in court?

Under section 3 of Malaysia’s Evidence Act 1950, a visual recording is a document, and so is a matter produced by a computer. Whether footage holds up is for the police and courts, but the building controls two things: whether the recording is accurate, and whether someone can speak for the machine that made it.

Section 90A(2) lets a computer’s production of a document in its ordinary use be proved by a certificate signed by a person responsible for managing its operation or the activities it was used for, and section 90A(4) then presumes the computer was in good working order. A certificate is one route, not the only one, and whether a recorder counts as a computer is for a court. Either way, someone in the building should know how the recorder is run and hold its administrator access. If those accounts left with the developer’s contractor, see what a JMB inherits at developer handover, including who releases recordings.

Accuracy starts with the clock. The Home Office manual says time and date are recorded “firstly to add evidential weight to the pictures”, and that the clock should not “slowly drift from the true value”. Section 90B lets a court weigh a document’s accuracy. A recorder can take its time from an NTP server; the Singapore standard recommends time synchronised to GPS.

What should a CCTV diagnostic attendance put in writing?

A CCTV diagnostic attendance should put in writing the cameras and period affected, the logs and disk status, any footage recovered, the clock error and who receives alerts, because the committee may have to explain the gap to owners, a resident or the police.

How does a building find out before the next incident?

By testing the recording on a schedule. The Singapore standard lists regular audits of storage duration, alarms and recorded image quality, and the UK Home Office manual recommends exporting sample video from each camera at commissioning as a reference. A simple routine: play back an old date on every camera and check the clock.

For contract wording, see what a security maintenance contract must cover; for replacement, how long a building’s CCTV, access control and intercom last.

Occhio Tec is an Extra Low Voltage contractor established in 2010. It designs, installs and maintains CCTV, access control, video intercom and structured networking, has worked in high-end condominiums in Kuala Lumpur’s Mont Kiara, Bangsar and KLCC for service and maintenance, and takes over systems another contractor installed. Message WhatsApp +60 11-6494 4931, or request a site survey.