Condominium CCTV Footage Retention in Malaysia: How Many Days?.
QUESTION ANSWEREDOur recorder is set to 30 days and the footage from two weeks ago is already gone. Why, and how many days do we actually have?
A condominium CCTV recorder holds as many days as its disks can take at the rate the cameras write, so the figure set at handover is rarely the figure a JMB or MC has today. The days fall whenever cameras are added or image quality is raised and storage is not. No minimum was located in the statutes checked, leaving two things: the 31-day convention, and the building’s own measurement.
- 01Retention is a setting bounded by disk capacity, not a property of the recorderA SETTING
- 0224 cameras at 4 Mbit/s fill 24 TB in about 23 days; add eight cameras and raise eight streams to 8 Mbit/s and the same disk holds about 14THE ARITHMETIC
- 03Ask for the oldest recording still held on each camera, in writing, read on one dayWHAT TO ASK FOR
- 04No CCTV or retention provision was located in the Strata Management Act 2013, text consolidated to June 2015NO LEGAL MINIMUM
- 0531 days is the UK Home Office and police convention, not Malaysian law; and if the PDPA applies, contravening a data protection principle has carried up to RM1 million since 1 April 2025WHAT LAW THERE IS
ON THIS SHEET05 SECTIONS
Why was the condominium CCTV footage already overwritten?
A recorder overwrites its oldest material because disk space, not intention, decides how far back it reaches. The UK Home Office’s CCTV manual states the mechanism plainly: a recorder operating continuously can only retain video for a set period before it is overwritten. Nothing announces the moment that window closes — the cameras work, the recorder works, and the week someone wanted has been written over by the week after it.
So the first action is not an investigation. If any part of the incident may still be on the disk, have the sequence exported or protected today, before the next day of recording takes it: the Home Office manual notes that some systems can protect sequences of particular interest so they are not overwritten. Make the request in writing, naming the cameras and the hours, because the window shrinks while the question is being discussed.
After that, the useful question is why the window is shorter than the building believed. Retention belongs to the same class of silent decline as the other faults in when a building’s system starts failing: nothing visible changes, and the loss surfaces on the one day it matters. The question to put to whoever maintains your system is the oldest recording date on every camera. Occhio Tec works on CCTV, access control, intercom and networking for condominiums across Mont Kiara, Bangsar, KLCC, Desa Park City, Bukit Jalil, Petaling Jaya, Cyberjaya, Putrajaya and Klang, a reach still growing, and takes over systems another contractor installed: a survey puts that oldest-recording date in writing, camera by camera. Request a site survey, or message +60 11-6494 4931.
What happened to the days the building had at handover?
A condominium CCTV system loses days to anything that makes it write more data each day onto a disk that did not grow. Retention is capacity divided by data written per day, so a building that doubles what it records daily halves the days it keeps. A camera added to the car park in year three therefore shortens the window on every camera sharing that recorder, not only on itself.
| The change | Why it was made | Effect on retention |
|---|---|---|
| Cameras added | A blind spot, a new block, a committee request | Shortens the window on every camera sharing that recorder |
| Resolution raised | Faces at the lobby door were unusable | More data per camera per day, so fewer days for all of them |
| Frame rate raised | Movement at a barrier looked jumpy | More data per camera per day, in the same direction |
| Continuous instead of motion | An event was missed and recording was widened | Often the biggest step for cameras that were previously quiet, such as risers and plant rooms |
| A disk lost, not replaced | Nobody was watching the recorder’s own health | On a recorder without redundancy, capacity falls and the window shortens with no setting touched |
The sum is worth doing on paper, because it is the part a committee is never shown. The figures below are an illustration with every input stated, not a measurement of any building, and a building’s own numbers will differ — but the shape does not. They assume continuous recording at a constant rate, and storage counted as usable capacity after redundancy, with a terabyte taken as 1,000 GB.
| Input | At handover | Three years later |
|---|---|---|
| Cameras recording continuously | 24 | 32 |
| Stream per camera | 4 Mbit/s | Eight cameras added at 4 Mbit/s and eight existing ones raised to 8 Mbit/s, so 24 at 4 and 8 at 8 |
| Written per camera per day | 43.2 GB | 43.2 GB, or 86.4 GB on the raised streams |
| Written per day, whole system | 1,037 GB | 1,728 GB |
| Usable storage | 24 TB | 24 TB, unchanged |
| Days the disk holds | About 23 | About 14 |
| Storage needed for 30 days | About 31 TB | About 52 TB |
Does better compression buy the days back?
Partly, and it is one lever with a quality cost attached. Encoding happens in the camera, so this is a camera decision rather than a recorder one: Axis Communications states that its own Zipstream encoding lowers bandwidth and storage requirements “by an average of 50% or more” against standard compression, a manufacturer’s figure for its own product that will vary with the scene.
The trade is quality, and the Home Office manual is explicit that adjusting a recorder to increase retention time reduces the stored image quality. A short window should not be solved by compressing a building’s way out of recognisable faces. How resolution, cabling and storage move together is worked through in analogue versus IP CCTV for a condominium.
How many days does your condominium hold today?
The only honest measure of retention is the oldest recording still available on each camera on the day you look. Cameras on different streams, schedules or disks do not all reach back equally far, so a single figure quoted for the system is an average at best.
The Home Office’s own operational-requirements question is this one — “How long is the video retained on the system before being overwritten?” — and a management committee is entitled to the answer as evidence rather than as reassurance.
- Ask for the oldest available recording date and time, camera by camera, all read on the same day.
- Take it in writing from whoever maintains the system; a screenshot of a menu showing a configured number proves nothing about what survives.
- Compare the shortest camera, not the average, against the period the building believes it has.
- Repeat after any camera is added, any disk or recorder is replaced, and any change to image quality or recording mode.
That measurement is also the honest input to every later decision, from a tender to a renewal, which is why the interim measures a building takes while a decision is pending start with confirming what is actually recording and for how long. If whole cameras are missing from the recording list rather than reaching back a shorter distance, the problem is not retention but a recording fault: what to do when the CCTV is not recording.
What does Malaysian law actually say about CCTV retention?
No retention period for a condominium’s CCTV was located in the statutes checked here. The Strata Management Act 2013, in the text consolidated to June 2015, carries no CCTV or retention provision at all, and the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 runs the other way: where it applies, it caps how long footage may be kept rather than obliging a building to keep any.
Whether the Act reaches a condominium’s cameras at all is not settled. Section 2(1) applies it to “any personal data in respect of commercial transactions”, and no provision says whether a JMB or MC running cameras for residents is doing that, so the prudent course is to handle footage as though the Act applies.
On that footing nothing obliges the building to keep footage; the exposure runs the other way, towards keeping it too long. Personal data “shall not be kept longer than is necessary for the fulfilment of that purpose”, with a duty to destroy or permanently delete it once no longer required, and since 1 April 2025 contravening a data protection principle has carried a fine of up to one million ringgit, or imprisonment of up to three years, or both — raised from three hundred thousand ringgit and two years by the 2024 amendment, which also renamed the data user as the data controller.
PDPA does not prescribe any minimum or maximum period for the storage of recorded images. However, the retention period of those images should reflect the purpose of recording by an organization.
Is the 2014 CCTV guidance binding?
It is not binding, and that matters because it is the document most pages on this question lean on. The paper is a consultation proposal issued in 2014 for comment, and it closes by saying that it represents the Department’s initial suggestions — so a contractor citing it as a legal retention requirement is overstating it.
In our own probe of this question on 17 October 2026, two queries put to ChatGPT and Gemini from Malaysia returned practice figures between 14 and 60 days, most often 30, and the Department’s paper as the document cited for the legal position.
What retention period should a JMB or MC set?
Set it from the purpose, because that is what the retention principle measures against: how long this building would realistically take to notice an incident and report it. The figure most written policies trace to is the UK Home Office manual’s, which records that “A retention time of 31 days has traditionally been used for most CCTV applications and is still recommended by police”, with 14 days a workable minimum for smaller premises facing less serious incidents.
Neither figure is Malaysian law, so a building adopting one should say it is following practice. Then do three things with it: write the number and the reason into the building’s own policy, buy the storage that number actually costs — about 52 TB for the thirty-two-camera case above — and re-measure it quarterly, because a configured 30 is not a held 30. Where the convention comes from is set out on the pillar page for a failing system, and how the period is written into a tender is in the scope of works for a CCTV tender.
What should the maintenance agreement oblige?
A maintenance agreement should oblige the contractor to measure, report and restore the retention the building paid for, not merely to configure it once at handover. The Home Office manual puts retention time alongside recorded image quality and frame rate as the things a requirement states for each camera, from which the supplier sizes the storage.
An agreement that never returns to those three numbers lets all three drift quietly for years, which is how a thirty-day building becomes a fourteen-day building without a single decision being taken.
- The oldest available recording date for every camera, reported at each scheduled visit.
- A re-measurement whenever a camera is added, or a disk or recorder is replaced.
- A check of recorded image quality rather than live view, because those are not the same picture.
- Disk health reported before a drive is lost rather than after.
These are the numbers a maintenance agreement should name, rather than leaving them in a handover folder where nobody returns to them. What a servicing contract must contain more broadly is set out in what a maintenance agreement must actually oblige.
One point is better settled before an incident than after it. Because no statute checked here sets a minimum, the number of days a building holds is decided by its own policy and by what the agreement obliges — which is exactly why both should name it. If your building cannot say today how many days it holds, that is the thing to establish first — request a site survey, or message +60 11-6494 4931.
Questions committees ask about CCTV retention
Q-01Can we keep one clip longer than the rest of the month?
Usually yes, and the Personal Data Protection Department’s 2014 proposal paper suggested that images may be kept longer where needed for investigation by law enforcement agencies, while adding that they must be deleted when there is no longer a reason to keep them. Protect or export the single sequence rather than extending the whole building’s retention period to save one incident: a longer period for everything is a larger holding of other residents’ images, kept for no stated purpose.
Q-02A resident has asked for a copy. Does that change what we may keep?
Not for the whole system, but yes for the clip in question: a pending request, complaint or police report is a reason to preserve that sequence while it is being decided, and releasing footage and retaining it remain separate questions. Who may be given a copy, on what conditions, and what the building should record when footage leaves the premises are worked through in condominium CCTV footage requests.
Q-03The footage is gone. Was that our failure or the contractor’s?
No statute checked here obliges a building to keep footage for any period, so losing it early is not in itself a breach of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010. What decides the question is what was promised: the retention figure named in the maintenance agreement, the monitoring and reporting it obliges, and the building’s own written policy. Where the Act does apply to the cameras, a contractor handling that data has had to comply with the Security Principle in its own right since 1 April 2025 — a duty about protecting the recordings, not about how many days they are held.