What we learned backing up CCTV through a real Naivasha blackout

Last month we watched a power cut do exactly what power cuts do to CCTV, and it's worth writing down, because it explains why we built SimbaVault the way we did.

The site was in Naivasha. Ordinary evening. Then the power dropped, not once, but twice within an hour, the way it often does when the grid is unsettled. The cameras went dark. The recorder went dark. And the little PC that pushes footage off-site went dark with it.

Here's the thing most people don't realise about their CCTV: when the power comes back, the gap doesn't fill itself. The recorder starts recording again from that moment forward. Those missing minutes stay missing. If something happened during the cut, there is simply no footage of it. Ever.

For a lot of businesses, that's the whole risk in one sentence. The incident you most want on camera is often the one that happens when things are already going wrong: during the outage, the confusion, the moment nobody's watching.

So what did we actually do about it?

Our system had been quietly keeping a second copy of that site's footage off-site. When the power came back and the connection returned, it did something ordinary backup can't: it worked out exactly which minutes were missing from the off-site record, went back to the recorder, and pulled the footage the recorder had kept locally during the recovery windows.

The result: of a 45-minute hole, we recovered about 37 minutes, everything the cameras had actually captured once power blinked back between the two cuts. It landed back in the record at the correct time, as if the gap had never been there.

And the part we're honest about

There were still about eight minutes we couldn't recover. Those were the moments when the power was fully out, when the recorder itself had no power and wrote nothing at all. No system on earth can recover footage that was never recorded.

We say that plainly because it matters. Anyone promising you "zero loss, guaranteed" is either overselling or hasn't tested against a real blackout. What we promise is different, and we think better: we recover everything your equipment captured, we tell you clearly about anything we couldn't, and we'll show you the one cheap fix (a small backup power supply on your recorder) that closes even those last gaps.

Why we bother

Because "we back up your CCTV to the cloud" is the easy part. Lots of people do that. The hard part, the part that actually protects you, is what happens when the connection drops, the power cuts, or someone with access decides the footage shouldn't exist. That's the part we built for.

If your business depends on footage being there when it counts, get in touch. We'll take a look at your site and tell you honestly what we can protect.