Here's the part nobody mentions in the store: most home security cameras don't keep your video in your home. They upload it — footage of your kitchen, your kids, your front hall — to a company's servers, charge you every month to keep it there, and hand it back to you through an app.
You bought a camera. What you actually signed up for was letting a stranger's computer hold the recording.
There's another way to do this, and it's the whole reason NoBreak exists.
What "cloud camera" really means
When people say cloud camera, they mean the entire pipeline lives somewhere else:
- The camera records your home.
- It uploads that video over your internet to the vendor's servers.
- The detection — deciding what's a person, what matters — runs on their computers.
- You get a notification and stream your own footage back down to your phone.
Your video takes a round trip through a company you've never met before you're allowed to look at it. Everything below follows from that one design choice.
The risks you're taking on
Your footage sits on someone else's servers
This is not a paranoid hypothetical. Camera companies have faced regulatory action over staff and contractors accessing customers' private video, and the industry has a long, well-documented history of credential-stuffing incidents where attackers got into customer accounts and watched live feeds inside people's homes.
The point isn't that any one vendor is careless. It's structural: once a copy of your living room exists on infrastructure you don't control, protecting it is somebody else's job, and you find out how well they did it after the fact.
It stops recording exactly when you need it
This one catches almost everybody. For a cloud camera, uploading is the recording. No internet, no video.
That matters more than it sounds, because losing your connection and having an incident aren't independent events. Storms take out power and internet together. And anyone who'd like your camera to stop working doesn't need to touch it — they just need to find the cable outside your house.
A camera that quietly stops recording during the one event you bought it for is not much of a security system.
The subscription never ends
Cloud storage costs the vendor money every month, so it costs you money every month. Typical Canadian plans run about $5-15 per camera, or $10-30 for a household. Four cameras for ten years is thousands of dollars — considerably more than the hardware — and those prices go up, not down.
You are renting access to a recording of your own home.
Your uploads slow everything else down
Every cloud camera pushes video out continuously, and residential upload speed in Canada is a fraction of download. A few 2K cameras can saturate it. The symptoms turn up somewhere that looks unrelated — video calls dropping, uploads crawling — and almost nobody traces it back to the cameras.
Features can disappear after you've paid
Cloud cameras depend on a service, and services change. The smart home industry is full of products that lost capability when a company was acquired, changed its pricing, or shut a line down. Hardware you own can quietly become less than what you bought.
Your footage is only as private as their policy
Video on a third party's servers can be handed over in ways video in your basement can't. Policies change, companies are bought, and terms get updated with an email you didn't read.
How local works instead
NoBreak keeps all four steps inside your house. Your cameras feed the Brain Box — a small, always-on computer we install in your home. It records to its own storage and runs its own detection on its own processor. Your phone talks directly to that box.
There's no monthly storage bill, because there's no server to rent. There's no company watching, because there's no company in the path. And when the internet goes down, it keeps recording, because the recorder is in the building.
That's the whole idea: professional protection that you own outright.
The honest part
Local isn't magic, and you should hear this from us rather than discover it later.
Storage hardware doesn't last forever — drives wear out, generally on a multi-year cycle, and eventually one needs swapping. Remote access has to be set up properly to be secure. And a system like this needs to be installed correctly to be worth having.
Which is exactly why we don't sell you a box and wish you luck. We install it, we configure the remote access properly, we monitor the system's health, and we handle the hardware when it needs handling. The trade-off we removed is the work. The ownership stays yours.
One trap to watch for
Plenty of cameras advertise an SD card slot and are still cloud systems. The card is a buffer. Detection still runs on their servers, the app still needs their service, and the files may not be readable without it.
Three questions settle it:
- Does it expose a standard stream (RTSP or ONVIF) a recorder of your choice can read?
- Does detection run on hardware you own?
- Does it work with the vendor's servers unreachable?
If any answer is no, it's a cloud camera with a card in it. This is a real constraint — battery doorbells in particular tend to expose no continuous stream at all. When we tested one popular battery line, event-triggered clips were the ceiling, and pulling even those noticeably drained the battery.
Which one is right for you
Cloud is a reasonable choice if you rent, want one camera working this afternoon, and don't mind the subscription or the privacy model.
Everything else points local — if you own your home, have more than a couple of cameras, keep any of them pointed inside, care where footage of your family lives, or want a system that stays up when your internet doesn't.
If that's you, that's exactly who we built NoBreak for. We're installing across Toronto and the GTA now, and the waitlist is the first step — no obligation, and we'll walk your property with you before you commit to anything.
Frequently asked questions
Where is my security camera footage stored? With a cloud camera, on the vendor's servers, usually for 7-30 days depending on what you pay. With a local system like NoBreak, on a drive inside your home, for as long as there's space. If the product page talks about storage plans, it's cloud.
Can the camera company watch my footage? With a cloud system, technically yes — your video is on their infrastructure, and staff access has been the subject of regulatory action in this industry. Some vendors offer end-to-end encryption, but it's often off by default and can disable features you paid for. With a local system there's no company in the path at all.
Do security cameras work without internet? Local systems keep recording; you just lose remote viewing until the connection returns. Most cloud cameras stop recording entirely, because uploading is how they record. Since outages and incidents often happen together, this is one of the most important questions to ask before buying.
Can security cameras be hacked? Internet-connected cameras have been compromised repeatedly, usually through reused passwords on the vendor's account system rather than the camera itself. A local system removes the internet-facing account entirely, which removes that whole category of attack.
What happens to my footage if the company shuts down? Local footage is unaffected — the files are on your drive. Cloud footage is subject to whatever the vendor's wind-down terms say, and customers have historically had short windows to export before losing access.
Is a subscription-free camera actually cheaper? Over any reasonable time horizon, yes. You pay more up front for hardware and nothing monthly after that, instead of paying forever. Four cameras on a typical cloud plan runs into the thousands over a decade.