CCTV stopped recording? Five common causes, in checking order
GNS Engineering Team 2 min read
The camera still shows a picture, but nothing is being recorded. That is the most common CCTV call we take. Live view and recording are two different paths: the picture travels over the network, the recording depends on the drive inside the recorder. A perfectly healthy live view can sit on top of days without recording.
1. The hard drive (most common)
A drive is a consumable. Write errors, bad sectors and falling health all stop the recording while live view carries on untouched. To tell: look at drive health and available time in the Protect storage settings. If the retention shown is shorter than what you configured, the drive is usually the reason.
2. Recorder power or heat
A recorder runs at high load for years, so poor rack ventilation or an ageing UPS battery will reboot it. The symptom is a gap of minutes to hours in the recording, at different times each time.
3. A network break
If the path between camera and recorder crosses anything unstable — a loose patch lead, a bad switch port, a changed VLAN — recording becomes intermittent. CCTV belongs in its own network segment, for security and so that this is easy to isolate.
4. Not enough PoE power
A PoE switch has a total power budget. As cameras are added, or a hungrier model goes in, individual cameras drop offline at random. The budget should be calculated before the camera is added, not after.
5. Settings that changed
Shortened retention, a recording schedule limited to certain hours, or altered account permissions all look like a recording failure. These are the easiest to check and the easiest to overlook.
The order we check them
- Drive health and the actual retention in days. 2. Unexpected reboots of the recorder. 3. Connection history for the affected cameras. 4. The total PoE budget. 5. The recording schedule and retention settings. Most cases are found in the first two steps.
What a managed service changes
The real problem with a recording failure is not the repair, it is how long it takes anyone to notice. A managed service reads drive health, camera online rate and recorder status continuously, schedules a swap when the drive trend turns down, and shows the actual retention in the monthly report. The Complete tier adds CCTV health monitoring. The method is set out in the whitepaper, and tiers and fees are on the managed service page.
Frequently asked questions
If I can see the picture, is it recording?
No. Live view streams over the network while recording writes to the recorder drive. When a drive starts to fail the picture usually looks perfect while recording has stopped. Check the actual retention in days, not the live view.
How long should a surveillance drive last?
It depends on camera count, resolution and write load. Under dense 4K recording, a surveillance-grade drive typically lasts two to four years. We judge replacement by health and trend rather than waiting for outright failure.
Can we just call you when the recording stops?
You can, but footage from the days before anyone notices cannot be recovered. The value of the managed service is monitoring drive health and online rate continuously, so the problem surfaces before or at the start of the gap.
