The big driver for the system we bought was to be able to see cars pulling in our driveway which couldn't be seen from my shop. My wife wanted to be able to check on me in the shop, and she wanted to be able to pull up a view of the front door. Remotely checking in on things was a bonus but I didn't store any data offsite. Before setting up something like that I'd look into how much data you'd be moving across your internet connection and any hard or soft limits your ISP may have. I believe my system had a 1TB drive and held about 2-4 weeks of video based on motion triggers. That included pretty much continuous video anytime I was in the shop, every time a bug, snow, steam from the furnace kicking on, a bird, car, wind blowing a bush, cloud shadows, etc, etc.