VICIdial Call Recording: The Storage Math Nobody Does Until It's Too Late

Here's how it usually goes. You enable campaign recording, calls get recorded, files land on disk. Six months later you're staring at 2 TB of WAV files, your compliance team is asking about PCI-DSS, a client wants recordings from 14 months ago that you already deleted, and you realize you never planned any of this. Recording in VICIdial seems simple until it isn't. This is the stuff that matters in production. The Storage Math A 50-agent outbound operation running 8-hour shifts generates roughly 18,000 minutes of recorded audio per day. In WAV format (VICIdial's default), that's about 17.3 GB daily, or 380 GB per month. Annually, you're looking at 4.5 TB. Switch to MP3 at 32 kbps and the numbers drop to about 47.5 GB/month — an 8-10x reduction. But there's a catch: MP3 encoding adds CPU overhead on the telephony server. At 50 concurrent recordings, expect 5-10% additional CPU utilization. The practical recommendation: record in WAV for the active period when QA reviews, disputes, and c