Who owns an inspection video works out whose it is. This is the call where the answer turns out not to matter, because there is nothing left to own.
Somebody wants footage from a job. You look it up. The inspection is there, the job record is there, and the video is not, because your retention window closed and the file was deleted on schedule.
That is the system working. It is also a genuinely awkward sentence to deliver, and doing it badly makes a correct decision look like a failure.
Say what happened, not that it is missing
The difference between these two answers is everything.
"I can't find it." Sounds like disorganisation. Invites a follow-up asking you to look harder. Leaves the caller suspecting the video exists and you would rather not produce it.
"Our recordings are kept for one year and then deleted automatically. That job was in March 2024, so the video was deleted in March 2025. The job record is still here — I can tell you the date, who did the walk, the scope, and what was found."
The second answer is a policy, applied. It cannot be argued with, it does not imply carelessness, and it arrives with what you do still have attached to it. Nobody has ever pushed back on the second version in my experience, because everybody understands a company that deletes old video on a schedule.
Do not apologise for the policy. Explain it once and move to what you can provide.
Know the number before the phone rings
You cannot deliver that sentence if you have to go and find out. Know your window.
The common shapes are ninety days, one year, and three years, tied to the plan a company is on. Whichever one you are on, everybody who answers the phone should be able to say it without looking it up, and should be able to do the subtraction in their head. "That was four years ago, so no" is a five-second call. "Let me check and get back to you" is a week of ambiguity for both sides.
If you do not know yours, find out today. It is the single most useful piece of operational trivia in this whole subject area.
What survives, and why it should
Deleting the media does not mean deleting the job. The record of what happened is small, cheap, and should long outlive the video.
Keep: the date, the address, who did the inspection, the scope, the findings as written, the photographs you selected into the file, the invoice, the warranty terms. That is the part that answers most questions, and it answers them faster than footage does, because nobody has to watch anything.
Delete: the raw walkthrough. It is large, it contains the interior of somebody's home, and it is the part that stops being appropriate to hold indefinitely.
Getting that split right is most of what a retention policy is for. Deleting on purpose is the argument for the split; this post is what it feels like on the day it pays off, and on the day it costs you.
When the answer is genuinely painful
Occasionally the deleted thing was the thing. A dispute surfaces four years on, the written record is thin, and the walkthrough would have settled it in ninety seconds.
Two honest observations about that.
It is not an argument for keeping everything forever. The cost of indefinite retention is not storage. It is holding video of hundreds of people's homes with no end date and no plan, which is a worse position to be in than occasionally lacking a file. A window you chose beats a pile you never revisit.
It is an argument for a hold. If a job is live in some ongoing matter, mark it before the window closes rather than hoping. Whatever your system, the point is that somebody has to decide to keep a thing, in advance, and write down why. Nobody can retrieve a decision that was never made.
Stop it recurring: tell customers the window exists
This is the part that actually reduces the number of these calls, and almost nobody does it.
When you send a customer a recording, or when you finish a job that was recorded, say how long it will exist. One sentence on the closing email: "We keep the inspection video for a year. If you want a copy for your own records, let me know and I will send you one."
Most people will not take you up on it. The ones who do are the ones who were going to call in three years, and now they will not have to. It costs a line of text and it converts a future awkward conversation into a present helpful one.
There is a version of this written for the property owner, what happens to the video afterward, which says the same thing from their side: ask early, watch it when it arrives, keep your own copy if it matters to you. Sending that link with the closing email does the job for you.
The rule underneath all of it
A retention window is a promise in two directions. It promises the customer that video of their home will not sit on a server forever, and it promises you that you will not be asked to produce something from six years ago.
Both halves only work if the window is real, known, applied without exception, and said out loud to everybody it affects. A policy nobody can quote is not a policy, it is a habit, and habits do not survive a difficult phone call.
The retention options by plan are on the pricing page, and how deletion is actually carried out is on the security page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.