Videos all black beyond 5 days?

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pbc

Getting comfortable
Jul 11, 2014
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Not sure if I have my storage settings off, but I came back from a 17 day vacation and someone in the neighbourhood was asking to see if I had some license plates from August 8. I didn't think I'd have that far back, but checked anyhow. Noticed that anything prior to 5 days old doesn't show up in my BlueIris. I.e., when I go to say August 14, double click on that time period, all cameras show as black. I can click play, and the video is just black. I have two 3 TB drives on my system, use 7 cameras plus a LPR camera.

Just curious if I have my settings incorrect somewhere as (maybe incorrectly) I thought I'd be getting more than 5 days of storage, or does the live storage only show what is in the "New" folder as I've set it below and I need to do something different to search through the "Stored" folder?

If it helps, cameras in the Status bar right now show as:

1661009388929.png

Video is set to record 24/7, clip storage is set as follows:

1661009462243.png 1661009494102.png
1661009511454.png
 
Ahhhh...maybe I should be clicking on "Move to folder" and that's why there is nothing in my Storage folder! Lmk if folks see anything else they suggest I should think about changing!
 
Hmmm...also looks like I shouldn't be bothering with the moving of files do different drives. Will have to look into how to figure out optimizing which cameras save to which drives.
 
Made some adjustments to the limits...

1661113701244.png
 
Also, not sure if this is correct, but in reading @sebastiantombs posts, in the camera settings, I moved 4 cameras to the "New" directory, and 4 to the "stored" directory (and the LPR also goes to the same drive the "Stored" directory is on) by adjusting this setting below. Wasn't sure if this was the correct way to change where the camera video was being stored?

1661114054625.png
 
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with 2 3TB drives you theoretically have about 5000GB of storage ( roughly). You can assign more cameras to the LPR drive and utilize more of that space. which will give you about 3 weeks or more of recording.
Im getting 4-5 weeks sharing an 8TB and a 5TB with 18 Cams (including 1 LPR)
 
Hmmm...so something funky is still going on. Hard to even describe. Before when I would click on a time (say last 24 hours), all cameras would move to that and I could press play and watch the video, then if I wanted to, quickly click on another time and all cameras would adjust. Now it seems the cameras get stuck and won't got to certain times, or just take 30-60 seconds to adjust to the new time.

Things are just super laggy.

Seems the LPR camera (video saved to folder LPR on the E drive named "Stored" drive) is fine. Some of the other cameras on the stored drive also, sometimes, show up. It's weird, when I click on the date/time, sometimes I can see the video and it is fine, other times, I click, the cameras start to show the image, then go black.

But everything has become super laggy.

Clip storage:

1662031999924.png
 
Camera settings for a camera on the "New" drive that I don't seem to be getting any history beyond a couple days:

1662032227749.png
Camera settings fo rhte LPR camera, which I am getting tons of history:
1662032259671.png

Camera setting for the cameras on same drive as LPR but different folder (do I need to bother with an "LPR" folder?):

1662032307110.png
 
The Automation Guy said:
Are you sure the "Stored/LPR" drive is in good health? If it is starting to get bad sectors or highly fragmented, it may be slowing down everything.
Click to expand...

No, assume I can google some freeware to check the drive? Anything you'd recommend?

Does it make sense to format the drive and are there parameters on the format that work better for this functionality (cluster sizes, etc)?
 
pbc said:
No, assume I can google some freeware to check the drive? Anything you'd recommend?

Does it make sense to format the drive and are there parameters on the format that work better for this functionality (cluster sizes, etc)?
Click to expand...
If there is nothing important on that drive, then I think the easiest thing to do would be to reformat the drive. Since we are dealing with large files, you can set it up to use large block sizes, but honestly it probably doesn't matter that much. Just use whatever the default settings are.
 
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The Automation Guy said:
If there is nothing important on that drive, then I think the easiest thing to do would be to reformat the drive. Since we are dealing with large files, you can set it up to use large block sizes, but honestly it probably doesn't matter that much. Just use whatever the default settings are.
Click to expand...

Nothing important on them. To format, do I need to fully shut down BI (given it is always trying to write to the drive)? When I end the task BI just automatically restarts in the background.
 
You can shut down BI by unchecking "run as a service" in the config on the console. It does need a shutdown of the console itself after that to shut it down though.

Formatting in a larger block size does have two benefits. It cuts down on head movement due to the lower number of blocks and it also cuts down on fragmentation. 1024 is a good block size for video drives.
 
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sebastiantombs said:
You can shut down BI by unchecking "run as a service" in the config on the console. It does need a shutdown of the console itself after that to shut it down though.

Formatting in a larger block size does have two benefits. It cuts down on head movement due to the lower number of blocks and it also cuts down on fragmentation. 1024 is a good block size for video drives.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm....am running a format on the E drive currently, did a quick one but then decided to uncheck "quick format", not sure if a longer format is more helpful.

But on the D drive, keeps saying there is a program that is using it. I have shut down everything I can think of that would be, is there a way to see what program is using the hard drive via task manager (can't seem to locate)?
 
pbc said:
Hmmmm....am running a format on the E drive currently, did a quick one but then decided to uncheck "quick format", not sure if a longer format is more helpful.

But on the D drive, keeps saying there is a program that is using it. I have shut down everything I can think of that would be, is there a way to see what program is using the hard drive via task manager (can't seem to locate)?
Click to expand...

That is strange. Normally a program isn't going to be running on anything but the C drive. I suppose a program might try to lock a drive while it's in use, but I think that would be pretty uncommon.

Since you don't care about anything on that drive, you could always pull the power from that one drive. This would require that you open up your computer case and physically pull the power cord from that drive. There are usually two cords going to each drive - a smaller SATA cable that is for data, and a power cable (the one with four individual wires and a larger physical connector). You can pull either, but pulling the power cable is probably the best option. Worse case scenario this corrupts data on the drive which would require a reformat, but you want to do that anyway.

Once you pull power, wait 5-10 seconds for the disk to stop spinning (it has momentum just like any other spinning object and must come stop) and then plug it back in. Hopefully this breaks/stops whatever was locking the drive and allows you to format it like normal.
 
The Automation Guy said:
That is strange. Normally a program isn't going to be running on anything but the C drive. I suppose a program might try to lock a drive while it's in use, but I think that would be pretty uncommon.

Since you don't care about anything on that drive, you could always pull the power from that one drive. This would require that you open up your computer case and physically pull the power cord from that drive. There are usually two cords going to each drive - a smaller SATA cable that is for data, and a power cable (the one with four individual wires and a larger physical connector). You can pull either, but pulling the power cable is probably the best option. Worse case scenario this corrupts data on the drive which would require a reformat, but you want to do that anyway.

Once you pull power, wait 5-10 seconds for the disk to stop spinning (it has momentum just like any other spinning object and must come stop) and then plug it back in. Hopefully this breaks/stops whatever was locking the drive and allows you to format it like normal.
Click to expand...
So pull the power while the PC is on?

I have no idea what would be writing to it, turned off BI and AITools, even turned Docker off though I don’t think it was using the drive. Strange indeed.
 
I wouldn't recommend pulling power on a drive in a PC that is running. Too many things can go really wrong with that idea.

If you bring up resource monitor, not task manager, you can see what is writing/reading from each disk and what programs are in memory. That will help you figure out what is running and using the D:\ drive safely.
 
sebastiantombs said:
I wouldn't recommend pulling power on a drive in a PC that is running. Too many things can go really wrong with that idea.

If you bring up resource monitor, not task manager, you can see what is writing/reading from each disk and what programs are in memory. That will help you figure out what is running and using the D:\ drive safely.
Click to expand...

Thanks, will see if I can figure it out.

In the mean time, any recco's on directory structure/number of cameras per drive, etc? I think I'm going to get rid of the dedicated LPR directory, not really sure why I did that for video. Maybe for the plate pics it makes sense.

Fine to have a "New" and "Stored" directory on both the E and D drives, then just use the New directory for each without bothering to use the "Store"?
 
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