The first time a homeowner asked me how long I keep the video, I did not have an answer for her. What I had was an external drive in the office with three years of roof footage on it, organized by nothing, and a phone that told me it was full every other Thursday. That is not a policy. That is a pile. Inspection video retention is one of those back-office questions that sits quietly for years and then matters enormously on one specific day, and it is never a day you scheduled.
Before anything else: I am a contractor, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. I will say that more than once, because this is the one subject in this series where being confidently wrong on the internet can actually hurt somebody.
Nobody on the internet can give you a number
Not me. Not a software vendor. Not the guy on the forum who picked his window because his cousin told him to.
Here is why. It depends on the state you work in, the states your customers are in, what your own contract templates say, what the general contractors above you require, what your warranty promises, what your insurer expects, and a half dozen other things that vary by trade. Those rules differ in ways that are not intuitive, and they change.
So when you find a post that hands you a tidy number of years, understand what happened: somebody picked a figure that sounded responsible and typed it. Copy it into your operations manual and you now have a records policy authored by a stranger who has never read your contract.
The only correct move is to buy an hour from a lawyer licensed where you work. Bring your contract templates, your warranty language, and an honest description of what you record and where it lives. Let them set the window. This post exists to help you show up with the right questions, not to answer them for you.
What keeping it buys, and what it costs
Both directions are real, which is why this is a decision and not an obvious answer.
Keeping it buys you memory. A roof I walked two years ago is gone from my head completely. The recording is not. When somebody calls about a leak in a valley I flashed, pulling up that walk to see what the decking looked like that morning is worth considerably more than my recollection, which at that distance is worth nothing. It also survives turnover. The tech who ran that inspection may not work here anymore. His memory left with him. The record did not.
Keeping it costs you three things. Money, the smallest of them, and I ran the arithmetic in what storing everything actually costs. Attention, because an archive nobody can search is furniture, not an asset. And exposure, which is the one people underweight. Every hour of footage you hold is footage of somebody's house, their yard, their vehicles, sometimes their kids' bikes on the driveway, and it has to be protected for exactly as long as you hold it. Keep a lot and you had better be able to answer plainly for how it is stored and who inside your shop can open it. Ours is written out on the security page.
Inspection video retention is a trade, not a virtue. Longer is not automatically more responsible.
The questions that actually set your window
These are the ones that decide inspection video retention for a shop like yours. Bring them to counsel rather than to a search engine.
What do my contracts say about records, and what do the ones I sign as a sub require? What does my warranty obligate me to produce, and for how long? What do my insurer and my license expect me to be able to hand over? Does anything I record carry its own handling rules, like interior footage of an occupied unit? If a customer asks me to delete their footage, what am I allowed to do?
And the one contractors do not like asking out loud: what happens if the recording shows something I did not flag at the time?
A recording is a record of what was visible, including what you walked past. My view is that a good inspector should still want it, because the fix is to be better on camera. Your lawyer may frame it differently than mine did.
Building an inspection video retention policy instead of a habit
A policy has four properties. It is written, uniform, automatic, and it leaves a trace.
Written, so a new hire's phone does not become its own archive with its own rules.
Uniform, because deciding job by job is the riskiest way to handle this. A shop that keeps everything from the smooth jobs and clears the rough ones has created a pattern, and patterns get noticed.
Automatic, because anything depending on somebody's memory on a Friday afternoon does not get done.
And it leaves a trace. When media goes, the fact that the inspection happened, when, at what address, and by whom should outlive the media itself. In our system the window is configurable per company, media is deleted after the configured window plus a grace period, and a record that the inspection occurred and that its media was purged is retained afterward. A gap in the archive then has an explanation attached to it instead of being a hole. I went further into that in deliberate deletion.
Photos need their own line, because most shops have far more of them in more places. That is how long to keep inspection photos.
Retention is also a sharing question. A file you no longer hold cannot leak, and an expired link cannot be forwarded to somebody you have never met. How you share inspection video and how long you keep it are one conversation approached from two ends.
The rule that overrides the entire policy
The moment you become aware of a dispute, or that one is coming, stop deleting anything connected to it. All of it. Including on automatic schedules. Then call a lawyer immediately, that day.
I am not going to explain the reasoning, because I am not qualified to and because you do not need the theory to follow the rule. Whatever you thought you were saving by clearing storage is nothing next to the position you put yourself in by destroying records after a problem has started. That is the point of what to keep when a job goes wrong, the post here I would most like every contractor to read.
Set a retention policy, in writing, with a lawyer licensed where you work, then configure your tools to enforce it so nobody has to remember. This is not legal advice and I am not your lawyer. It is the shape of a decision you are already making by default, whether or not you meant to make it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should I keep inspection video?
Nobody on the internet can give you a number, including me. The window is set by the work you do, what your contracts say, and the rules where you operate — which is a conversation with a lawyer licensed in your state, not a blog post. What I can say is that "until the drive is full" is not a policy.
Is there ever a reason not to delete on schedule?
Yes, and it overrides everything else. The moment a dispute looks likely, stop deleting anything — including whatever runs automatically on a schedule you set months ago — and call a lawyer. Routine deletion is fine right up until it is not, and that line moves without warning you.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.