5.7.2 - March 22, 2023 - Identifying and resolving storage errors and pitfalls

[wittaj]

Many here use the same settings for cut and combine that you do, so the issue is somewhere else, especially since your new folder is 5,000 clips.

I think it is all the thumbnails that don't show up in the alerts folder. You have 166,683 image clips in Alerts so you probably have close to that in thumbnail images not visible in this folder.

I'd delete the 166,683. I delete out my AI burned images in this folder all the time with no issue.

 

[Corvus85]

I'd delete the 166,683. I delete out my AI burned images in this folder all the time with no issue.

Thanks, I changed the Alerts folder to 1GB and ran a compact/repair - now the DB status window is not showing any issues.

Thanks again for your valuable help!

 

[Corvus85]

Ok I'm STILL having problems with my database.
I changed absolutely nothing since my last update here where everything was working fine.
I go to log in today, and checked the little calendar icon to see how many days of alerts my HDD is successfully capturing - and it only has red dots on today and yesterday. All other days are blank. When I click on them, the alerts pane says 'empty list'.
However when I select 'all clips', I can see 24/7 footage (for substream recordings) going back to 27th March.

I have my cameras set to record substream 24/7 while having alerts recorded in mainstream. I can't find any mainstream recordings older than yesterday.
What's going on here? I notice that my alerts folder is at its limit (1GB), and full of .dat files about 1.6 MB each at .jpg files at about 90 KB each. Is this normal?
Why is my system only recording 2 days worth of alerts?

 

[Flintstone61]

All your settings are the same as mine, which I'm pretty sure I havent changed from defaults...except i dont have anything going on in AI. I have not turned on the any AI features at this time.
nothing looks unusual on your end in those photo's.

 

[Flintstone61]

I did lose 2 days of alerts on out of 9 cams just yesterday. but I had monkeyed with the settings on the cam enabling timelapse tick box , and recently changing the cam from NVR to Blue Iris, and may have had a ONVIF user/pass issue. so my issue was tinkering.

 

[Corvus85]

All your settings are the same as mine, which I'm pretty sure I havent changed from defaults...except i dont have anything going on in AI. I have not turned on the any AI features at this time.
nothing looks unusual on your end in those photo's.

Are your cameras also set to 'continuous + alerts', recording in mainstream only when alerted and continuously recording on substream otherwise?

 

[Flintstone61]

Continous + alerts on 2 cams. and continous + Triggered on the other 6.

 

[Corvus85]

Ok so I'm back to square one and not having a clue then.
@wittaj any ideas?

 

[wittaj]

So what is happening is you are losing the alert "thumbnails" due to low storage in Alerts coupled with you filling that folder up with .dat and jpg files.

If your Alerts folder is filled up with .dat files, that could use up the 1GB quickly. Especially if you set the format cluster to a larger size.

And then with the jpegs, you are killing the available space even quicker. That would be one way that it would completely blow the cluster size out of the water. For example, if the drive is formatted for 2048K and a snapshot is 90K, then you are losing 1958K of that cluster that cannot be used as the next jpeg then starts the next cluster. That will add up quickly and you end up losing over 90% of the available storage.

The .dat files only need to be saved when troubleshooting. If you got the AI down, then quit saving the .dat files. Only save them when you are trying to troubleshoot AI and then turn them back off.

Any reason you are saving so many jpegs? Can you blow those out every day or turn them off?

Or you are gonna have to allocate a lot more GB to the Alerts folder if you don't delete these two options. If every two days is a GB, then you probably need to allocate 15-20GB based on roughly a month storage of video files.

 

[Corvus85]

The .dat files only need to be saved when troubleshooting. If you got the AI down, then quit saving the .dat files. Only save them when you are trying to troubleshoot AI and then turn them back off.

Aren't these the mainstream clips? I need these. Won't turning this feature off get rid of them? How would I even turn this off?

Any reason you are saving so many jpegs? Can you blow those out every day or turn them off?

No particular reason. Aren't these automatically generated for alert thumbnails? How do I turn them off?

 

[wittaj]

The .dat files are only needed for troubleshooting why AI did or did not identify something. Not saving .dat files does not delete your mainstream clips. When was the last time you looked at a .dat file?

Uncheck the "Save AI analysis details" and the .dat files are not saved.

No the jpgs in the alert folder are not generated automatically. By default the alert thumbnails are a hidden file that you cannot see, so if there are jpgs in that folder, it is because you did it.

The two most common are checking the box below "Burn label mark-up onto alert images" as well as changing default "database only" to "hi rez images". You are not doing the latter, so it is the burn label onto images that are all your files.

So do you need them? Can you delete next day? Deleting them does not eliminate the alerts or thumbnails in the BI console. I only use this on one camera so that is shows the vehicle and not headline shine, but every morning or couple of mornings I simply delete everything in the Alerts folder and it doesn't impact thumbnails or alerts at all.

 

[Corvus85]

Uncheck the "Save AI analysis details" and the .dat files are not saved.

Ok done. I'm not sure why I ever checked that. Maybe it was left on from early troubleshooting when I first built the system.

You are not doing the latter, so it is the burn label onto images that are all your files.

Ok unchecked. What does 'burn label onto images' do anyway? Which label?

I only use this on one camera so that is shows the vehicle and not headline shine

Use what? And how does this show the vehicle and not the headlight shine? Sounds interesting.

Thanks so much for the advice man! Really appreciate it.

 

[wittaj]

Yeah you probably had it on during troubleshooting and forgot to turn off.

The "burn label onto images" is where you will get a jpg of the object identified and it will have an orange rectangle around it with the label person, vehicle, etc.

At night, my one camera, that has a straight on angle of the street to get a side profile of a car, would either find a car but the alert image would be the lightshine on the street or just a part of the vehicle, or it would trigger out nothing found due to headlight bounce off the street.

Once I added a cancel banana in the field, it now will go thru all the images and select the best one, which gives me the whole vehicle in the frame and it eliminated the nothing found as well, but I have to use the burn label onto image for the vehicle to be in the center of the frame, so every couple days I simply delete these out of the Alerts folder, but they remain in the thumbnail alerts. It makes for scrubbing video much quicker as I can skip looking at video of known vehicles.

 

[Corvus85]

Once I added a cancel banana in the field, it now will go thru all the images and select the best one, which gives me the whole vehicle in the frame and it eliminated the nothing found as well, but I have to use the burn label onto image for the vehicle to be in the center of the frame

If it goes through all the snapshots it takes until it finds the best one, why would it require that it burn the image onto the label? Why wouldn't it just dumb that 'best' image straight to a thumbnail? Especially if they remain as thumnail alerts after you delete them.

 

[wittaj]

If it goes through all the snapshots it takes until it finds the best one, why would it require that it burn the image onto the label? Why wouldn't it just dumb that 'best' image straight to a thumbnail? Especially if they remain as thumnail alerts after you delete them.

One of life's mysteries lol. If I turn off burn label I get headlight shine thumbnails lol