Ask a software vendor how to get your data out and watch what happens. The answer tells you more about the relationship than the pricing page does.
It is an unglamorous question. It is also the one that decides whether a few years of inspections are an asset your company owns or a balance you hold at somebody else's institution.
Three moments when this stops being hypothetical
You change vendors. The obvious one. Whatever you cannot export becomes a subscription you keep paying for read access, which is not a tool any more, it is rent.
You sell the company, or buy one. Due diligence asks what the operational records are and whether they transfer. "They are in a system, and the system is in the founder's name" is a real answer that shows up in real transactions.
You wind down. The work stops but the tail does not. Disputes and callbacks arrive for years afterward, and the retention obligation outlives the operation that created it.
None of these are exotic. They are just far enough out that nobody asks about them during a trial.
What a real export actually contains
"You can download your videos" is not an export. A record is the media plus everything that makes it mean something.
- The media itself, in a standard format that opens without the vendor's player
- Which property and which job each item belongs to
- When it was captured — the timestamps that make a record hold up, not just a file modification date
- Who captured it, and who viewed it, if access was logged
- Any narration or notes attached to the walk
- A manifest so you can tell whether what arrived is everything
Strip the middle four and you have a folder of unlabeled video, which is close to worthless the first time somebody asks about a specific job from two years ago. That is the same failure as inspection photos nobody can locate later, just at the scale of a whole company.
Ask before you sign, not while you leave
The questions are short and the answers should be too:
Can I export everything myself, without asking you, without a fee? In what format? Does it include the metadata above? How long do I have after cancelling before it is deleted? If my card fails, do I lose access immediately or is there a grace period?
That last one catches people. Losing an archive over an expired card is a genuinely common way for records to disappear, and it is not something a vendor advertises.
Get answers before you have four years in the system. A vendor's export story is easy to be relaxed about while you are choosing and impossible to change once you are committed.
Keep your own copy of what matters
Even with a clean export path, a periodic pull of the highest-stakes material is cheap insurance. Not everything — the jobs that went sideways, the ones with disputes, anything a lawyer has ever mentioned. That set is small and it is the set you will actually be asked about.
It also interacts with deleting on purpose: a retention policy only means something if you control the mechanism. A policy you cannot execute because the data is somewhere you cannot reach is a statement of intent, not a policy.
We think about this because a company's inspection archive should belong to the company, which is the same reason recordings land server-side rather than on an inspector's phone. What we store and how it is protected is on the security page.
The vendor question and the phone question are the same question asked at different scale: is the record yours, or does it belong to whoever happens to be holding it?
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.