How long should fleet-camera footage be retained?
The honest answer: long enough to cover the moment you actually need it, and that moment is almost never the day of the incident. Claims surface days later. Disputes surface weeks later. A camera that overwrote its storage on Tuesday can't defend your driver on Friday.
Two kinds of storage, two different jobs
Fleet video systems keep footage in two places. Onboard storage is the SD card in the camera itself, a rolling loop that continuously records and eventually overwrites the oldest footage. Event clips are the moments the system decides matter: a hard brake, a collision-level impact, a flagged behavior, which are uploaded and kept independently of the loop.
Onboard capacity is what varies most between devices. Compact forward cameras commonly hold days of footage; larger multi-channel systems hold weeks. AirIQ's IQ-CAM MC30, for example, holds roughly 14 days on its 128GB card, while the four-channel ME40 holds about four weeks on 512GB. Event clips, once uploaded, don't expire with the loop.
What an insurer actually asks for
When a claim is disputed, the request is specific: the minutes around the incident, from every angle you have, with timestamps intact. That's why the workflow matters as much as the storage, footage you can pull remotely and share by a secure web link gets into an adjuster's hands the same day. Footage that requires pulling an SD card from a truck three states away does not.
A practical rule
Choose retention around your operating rhythm: if a vehicle can be on the road for two weeks before anyone reviews an alert, days of loop storage is thin. And whatever the loop length, confirm that incident events are preserved automatically the moment they're detected, including when a driver presses an SOS button, so the clip that matters is never at the mercy of the loop.
Some jurisdictions set minimum retention floors for commercial vehicles, check the rules where your fleet operates.