@Grevel Judging by how much I was paying for cloud backup for my cameras and how much it would have gone up to when I added a third,  It is an important income source for the Tapo brand.  Would you switch that off if you were a Tapo Company Director?  I think not and the share holders who are the company owners could easily vote you off the board at the next AGM.

Remember it is profit that enables the research and development that leads to the products we rely on.

The law around the world is the same "A company directors primary duty is to maximize profits for the shareholders".  So unless enough users become shareholders to propose and win a vote at an AGM to instruct the Directors to do this.......... In short "DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH" 

Yours 

Philip

  @pjbailey 

TP-Link do now sell the H500 hub which can act as central storage.  You still get the TP-server based remote access, but no remote storage, and don't need a paid subscription.  I have one and it's been fine so far and I've been able to ditch all the per-camera SD-cards. I'm using it with an SSD which I think might be better than a harddrive because the H500 only has passive cooling.  Given I'm using their remote-access service at no further cost, I feel it's rather a good deal.

They do also support ONVIF, which is perhaps the "industry-standard" way for security cameras to share their feeds.  As described earlier in this discussion, I built my own ONVIF monitoring software to store clips and raise email alerts, plus there are also more substantial and free ONVIF monitoring solutions out there.

I guess they could support SAMBA, FTP, SFTP, or email.  I don't expect them to because that many of these cameras are pretty low cost and often only WiFI connected (which can be quite variable in performance).  The fact they they support ONVIF plugs the open/DIY aspect reasonably nicely. 

I should note, not all of TP-Link's cameras support ONVIF(see feature request).  So they do have some work to do.