The answer to how long you should keep CCTV footage for depends firstly upon whether you are a domestic or a commercial CCTV owner. If you are using CCTV to protect your home then in practice you do not generally need to keep your CCTV footage for very long. This is because it is usually quite obvious if a crime has been committed such as a burglary. However, in practice it is worth keeping footage for a short period of time as on occasions the police may ask to review your footage to help with other crimes in the area. Therefore you may want to (but don’t have to) keep footage for 7-14 days.
For commercial operators, the situation is different. According to the Information Commissioner, data should not be retained for longer than necessary. That’s rather vague but over time a period of 31 days has become the de-facto length of time that most businesses keep their footage for. Should your business CCTV cameras record a crime, it is unlikely that it would take the police longer than this to ask for the footage.
