The honest answer is that the camera count matters far less than where they point. A four-camera system covering the right approaches beats an eight-camera system where half the units watch a boundary wall nobody would climb.
Start with entry points, not area
Walk your property and list every way a person could get in: the main door, the back door, the terrace access, the parking gate. Every one of those needs a camera. Everything else is secondary.
For a typical independent house that produces three to four positions. For an apartment it is usually one — the entrance — plus one covering the parking slot if it is allocated.
The gate is the most important position
If you install one camera, put it where it captures faces at the gate at head height, not mounted high looking down at the tops of heads. A camera at three metres pointed downward gives you excellent footage of scalps.
Resolution decides whether footage is useful
2MP is enough to tell you that a person was there. 4MP is where you start being able to identify who it was, and read a number plate at gate distance. If the footage is meant to be evidence rather than reassurance, the extra cost of 4MP is the single best upgrade you can make.
Retention is the part everyone forgets
You will not check your footage daily. You will check it when something happens, and often that is a week or two later — after you notice something missing. A system that keeps seven days of footage is a system that will have already overwritten the incident.
Thirty days is the sensible minimum for a home. That is a storage decision, not a camera decision, and it is cheap to get right at installation and expensive to retrofit.
What we would specify for a standard house
Four 2MP cameras covering the gate, main door, rear approach and parking; a four-channel recorder; a 2 TB surveillance-rated drive for roughly thirty days of retention; and mobile access configured properly with the default password changed.
That is a one-day installation and it covers the realistic threats. Anything beyond it should be justified by something specific about your property, not by a package upsell.
