Quick answer: If your cameras record to an NVR or DVR in a closet, the footage lives in exactly one place, and that place is inside the building where the incident happens. Burglars take the recorder, floodwater and fire destroy it, and a hurricane cuts its power for days, and the video goes with it. Hybrid cloud cameras record on the camera and back footage up to the cloud, so the evidence survives even when the building does not.
Most owners who call us after a break-in or a storm are not calling about the cameras. The cameras did their job. They are calling because the recorder is gone, and with it the one thing the cameras existed to produce. If you are comparing security camera systems in Hawaii, start by asking where the footage lives.
Why does a break-in so often take the footage with it?
Because the NVR is the first thing an experienced burglar looks for. The recorder is usually in the obvious spot, a back office, an IT closet or a shelf behind the register, and it is marked by the bundle of camera cables running into it. Pull the box off the shelf and every camera's recording leaves with it.
That is why so many incident reports have a clear view of the suspect arriving and nothing of what happened next. The cameras recorded it; the recording left in the suspect's backpack. On an NVR system there is no second copy unless someone set up off-site backup, and in small businesses almost nobody has.
What happens to an NVR in a flood, fire or hurricane?
It stops being a recorder and becomes debris. An NVR is a computer with spinning hard drives, and it sits low, often on the ground floor or in a basement equipment room, because that is where the cabling comes together. In the April 2018 Kauai flood, close to 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours at Waipa, and ground-floor equipment across the north shore went under water. The August 2023 Lahaina wildfire destroyed more than 2,000 structures, and any recorder inside them burned with the building. When Hurricane Lowell cut power to most of Kauai in September 2026, recorders without battery backup simply stopped, and the days the island spent in the dark were the days nobody was watching the property.
Power loss is subtler but just as damaging: an NVR that loses power records nothing until someone restarts it, and in a post-storm week that someone has bigger problems. Our hurricane-season security checklist for Hawaii businesses covers what to do before the storm; this post is about why the recorder is the weak link in the first place.
Isn't the point of an NVR that footage stays on site?
That was the selling point, and it is now the problem. Keeping video on your own premises sounded safer than trusting the internet. In practice it means the footage shares every risk the building faces: theft, water, fire, heat, power surges and plain hard-drive failure. A recorder that has run in a warm Honolulu closet for five years also has drives near the end of their life, and most owners find out only when they go looking for a clip.
There is a cybersecurity side to this as well. We wrote about it in why your NVR is less secure than a hybrid cloud video solution, and the short version is that an NVR exposed to the internet through port forwarding is a target, while a hybrid cloud camera connects outbound only.
How does a hybrid cloud camera keep footage safe?
By never relying on one copy in one place. A Verkada camera records to solid-state storage inside the camera itself, for 30 to 365 days depending on the model and license, so there is no central recorder to steal or flood. With cloud backup enabled, the camera also sends its footage to Verkada's cloud over an encrypted, outbound-only connection, so a copy exists off the island entirely. If a burglar rips a camera off the wall, the footage it already uploaded, including the approach, is still there. If the ground floor floods, the cameras that went under water have already backed up what they saw.
You can also review the footage from anywhere. After a break-in or a storm the owner is often the last person allowed back into the building, and pulling the clip from a phone to send to HPD or the insurer that same morning changes how the claim goes. Nothing is lost during an internet outage either, because recording continues on the camera and syncs when the link returns. For more background, see security advantages of hybrid cloud cameras and the advantages of hybrid cloud security cameras.
What does a Hawaii business actually need to do about it?
Find out where the only copy of your footage is today, then fix it. If you have an NVR, the options are off-site backup, which few NVRs do well, or cameras that carry their own storage and back up to the cloud. For the storm case, pair the cameras with a small UPS on the network switch so they ride through short outages, and consider a cellular gateway for remote connectivity so you can still see the property when the wired internet is down. For the break-in case, a video-verified alarm system means the monitoring center is already watching the clip while the burglar is still inside, which is when the footage is most useful.
For Honolulu security cameras or a neighbor-island site, we start with a site walk, map where footage is recorded today, and put the replacement design, licensing and on-site work in one written proposal. Mounting and cabling are performed by licensed Hawaii contractor partners. Explore our commercial security cameras in Hawaii to see which models carry the storage and backup described here.
Frequently Asked Questions
If a burglar steals a Verkada camera, is the footage gone? Footage already backed up to the cloud is not. The camera uploads video as it records when cloud backup is enabled, so the approach, the entry and the moments before the camera was removed are typically available in Command even if the camera itself is never recovered.
Do hybrid cloud cameras keep recording when the internet goes down? Yes. Each camera records to its own onboard storage during an outage and uploads what it recorded when the connection returns. You lose remote viewing during the outage, not the footage.
Can I keep my existing cameras and just get rid of the NVR? Often, yes, depending on the camera models. Verkada's Command Connector brings many third-party cameras into the same cloud dashboard. We review your camera list during the site walk and tell you which ones can stay.
How long does a hybrid cloud camera keep footage? 30 to 365 days on the camera, set by the model and retention license, plus archived clips in Command, which are kept with no expiration.
What should a Hawaii business do before hurricane season? Put the network switch and router on a UPS, confirm cloud backup is on, check that at least one person can log in from a phone, and run through our hurricane-season checklist. If the recorder is an NVR on the ground floor, move it up or plan its replacement before the season starts.