> If I had exterior cameras, I'd store the data for maybe a week?

Annecdata - but people I know who have cctv around their home store for as long as possible, limited only by the storage size availiable - every motion from a car / person / tree blowing through the trees - years of recordings.

People are selecting 180 days on Ring as the retention period (if they could select longer they probably would), the default is 60 days.