Almost every contractor I know is deleting inspection records constantly. They just do not call it that. A phone fills up before a Tuesday job and the tech clears his camera roll to make room. A laptop dies and nobody had checked the backup in a year. An employee leaves and his cloud account gets closed sixty days later with three hundred inspections inside it. A card gets reformatted. A free trial of some app expires and takes its contents with it.
That is a retention practice. It is just an accidental one, and accidental is the worst kind.
I am a contractor, not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. What I can talk about is the operational difference between deletion that happens to you and deletion you designed.
Deletion by drift is worse than deletion by design
Three reasons, and none of them are about storage.
It is inconsistent. Whatever survived is whatever happened to survive. One job has full footage because that tech never clears his phone, the next has nothing because his did. There is no principle behind the difference and no way to describe one.
It is unrecorded. You cannot say what you had. If somebody asks whether an inspection of a property was recorded, the true answer is that you do not know, and you have no way to find out. That is a genuinely uncomfortable sentence to have to say.
And it is invisible. Nobody decided, so nobody reviewed it, so it never got in front of a lawyer who might have told you the practice was a problem. Deleting inspection records by drift means the decision was made by a full phone.
Design does not mean keeping less. It might mean keeping considerably more. It means the outcome is the one you chose.
Deleting inspection records deliberately
Five properties. A practice that has all five is a policy. A practice missing any of them is a habit wearing a policy's clothes.
It is written down, in language a new hire can follow, including what happens to their phone.
It is uniform. Same rule, every job, every customer, every crew, regardless of how the job went.
It is automatic. If it depends on somebody remembering, it will not happen in a busy August.
It has a grace period, so a wrong setting or a mistyped window is recoverable rather than final. Ours deletes media after the configured window plus a grace period for exactly this reason.
And it leaves a trace. When the media goes, the fact that the inspection happened, when, at what address, and by whom should survive it. We retain a record that the inspection occurred and that its media was purged, so a gap in the archive has an explanation attached instead of being a silent hole. The window itself is configurable per company, because the right number depends on your state and your contracts and is not something a software company should be deciding for you.
Uniform beats clever
Of those five, uniformity is the one I would defend hardest.
The temptation is to be selective. Keep the complicated jobs, clear the routine ones. Hold on to the customers who seemed difficult. Clean up the job where you and the homeowner did not get along.
Do not do this. A selective practice creates a pattern, and patterns are legible to other people later even when your intentions were ordinary. A shop that keeps everything from the smooth jobs and nothing from the rough ones has written a story about itself that it did not mean to write and cannot easily unwrite.
Uniform is also easier. There is no judgment call, no meeting, nothing to remember. The rule runs on every job identically and you get to think about roofs instead.
The same logic applies to who can reach the records while they exist. Consistent access rules, expiring links, and a clear list of who inside your shop can open footage of a stranger's property are the other half of a records practice. How we handle that is on the security page, and the sharing side of it is in how inspection video gets shared.
The two rules I will state flatly
Everything above is operational. These two are the ones I care about most, and they run in opposite directions.
First: nobody can tell you that removing a particular record is fine. Not me, not your software vendor, not a forum. Retention obligations vary enormously by state, by trade, and by what your own contracts say, and they are not intuitive. A lawyer licensed where you work sets your window after reading your actual paperwork. This is not legal advice, it is a recommendation to go get some.
Second, and this one overrides everything else in this post: the moment you become aware of a dispute, or that one is likely, stop deleting anything connected to it immediately. That includes turning off the automatic deletion, which will otherwise keep running on schedule because a calendar does not know what happened on your job. Then call a lawyer that day. Deleting records after a problem has surfaced can put you in a far worse position than any amount of storage ever would have cost. That rule is the single most important thing in this group of posts, and it does not have exceptions you get to decide on your own.
Hold those two together and you get the actual shape of it. Deliberate deletion is a good practice for a business that is running normally. The instant a business stops running normally on a particular job, deletion stops entirely on that job and a professional takes over.
Where to start
Start by finding out what you have. Most shops cannot answer that, and it takes an afternoon: which phones, which drives, which accounts, which software, and whose. Then pick a system of record and get things flowing into it.
Then buy an hour from a lawyer, set the window, write it down, and configure the tool so nobody has to think about it again. That is the whole project. The broader framing is in the retention overview.
A policy you set on a quiet Tuesday is worth a great deal more than one you improvise on a bad Thursday. That is really the entire argument.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.