---
id: exports
title: Exports
---

**Exports** are how you keep a specific piece of footage permanently.

Frigate's recordings are governed by your [retention settings](/configuration/record): once footage ages past its retention window — or, depending on your configuration, once it is only kept where motion, alerts, or detections occurred — it is deleted to free up disk space. An **export** saves a copy of a chosen time range to a separate location that is **never removed by retention**, so it stays available until you delete it yourself.

This is the answer to the common question _"how do I stop Frigate from deleting an important clip?"_ Instead of increasing retention for an entire camera (which uses far more storage to protect a single moment), export just the footage you want to keep.

:::tip

Exports are stored under `/media/frigate/exports`, separate from your recordings, and are not counted against or removed by recording retention. They remain on disk until you delete them, so be aware that they accumulate over time.

:::

## Creating an export

There are a few ways to create an export:

- **From Review** — select (right click or long-press) an individual review item directly, and choose Export from the header menu. You can also select multiple review items and export them all at once, optionally grouping them into a [case](#cases).
- **From History** — open the **Actions** menu and choose **Export**. You can export a preset duration (the last 1, 4, 8, 12, or 24 hours), enter a custom start and end time, or select a range directly on the timeline. A **multi-camera** option lets you export the same time range across several cameras at once.

In every case you can give the export a name. Frigate then saves the footage from your recordings as a single video file. Larger ranges take time to process; the export is marked _in progress_ until it finishes, and you can keep using Frigate while it runs.

## Managing exports

All of your exports live on the **Exports** page, reachable from the main navigation, where you can search for one by name. Each export offers the following actions:

- **Play** it in the browser,
- **Download** it to save the footage outside of Frigate,
- **Share** it — copies a direct link to the export (or uses your device's share sheet),
- **Rename** it, and
- **Delete** it — deleting is the only way an export is removed.

You can also select multiple exports at once to **delete** them in bulk, or to **add them to** (or **remove them from**) a [case](#cases).

## Cases

A **case** groups related exports together — for example, all the clips from a single incident across multiple cameras. On the **Exports** page you can create a case with a name and description, add existing exports to it (or create a new case while exporting), and **download the entire case as a single archive** to hand off as one package.

Exports that don't belong to a case appear under **Uncategorized Exports**. Deleting a case lets you either keep its exports (they move back to uncategorized) or delete them along with the case.