Adding 3rd Hard drive .... best practices?

[pbc]

I currently have 2 3T hard drives and purchased a 4TB Purple that was on sale recently, have installed it into my PC and formatted it to NTFS, 1024 cluster size (will be an always recording drive).

Right now I have my setup such that 4 of my cameras go to one drive, and 4 to another. I want to move 2 cameras (LPR and Driveway one) to the 4TB drive, leave the rest.

Is it simply a matter of creating the New and Stored directories onto the new drive, and then pointing those cameras to the new drive vs the old drives? I assume on the existing drives the videos from the LPR and Driveway cameras will just be eventually over written and I don't have to bother formatting all drives and starting from scratch. Or is that the recommended route?

Just double checking before I do anything, just in case!

 

[wittaj]

Under BI storage settings, never change the names of Alerts, New, and Stored in the BI settings.

So change the name of the AuxX to whatever you want it. I would suggest not calling them New and Stored just to make sure something wacky doesn't happen.

So in your case just call Aux1 something like DriveLPR and put it there.

Also, do not use Stored for any video that is residing within the computer - for example don't move from New to Stored on the same drive. Only used Stored if moving to a NAS.

Best practice is to split your cameras among the drives. So in your case you have 8 cameras. Let's assume you have 2 on each side of the house. Best practice is to split one from each side onto another drive so if the drive goes bad, you still have some coverage from each side.

 

[Flintstone61]

As long you make sure your pointing to the 2 cameras to the correct new drive letter C:\ D:\ X:\Blue Iris\New...etc.... whatever you can use NEW and Stored.
like wittaj suggested sometimes it easier to surf your PC if they have more unique names Like X:\ Aux1\New

 

[pbc]

Also, do not use Stored for any video that is residing within the computer - for example don't move from New to Stored on the same drive. Only used Stored if moving to a NAS.

Curious, any issue with using "New" on one drive for storing a few cameras, and then "Stored" on a second drive for storing a few cameras? I.e., do you mean don't use the directory called Stored, or more don't bother moving from one directory to another sort of thing? E.g, IIRC, the setup sometimes says to "move" stored video from the New Directory to the Stored directory after a certain point of time, which I dont' do.

But currently I do have recordings of 4 cameras going to "Stored" which is on a D drive, and recordings of 4 other cameras going to "new" which is on a E drive sort of thing.

I don't limit clip dates and simply delete once it hits the limit size.

 

[wittaj]

Yeah that is fine as long as you remember that is what you did lol.

What you don't want to do is move from new to stored on the same drive or another drive in the box - if you have two drives it is better to split the cameras across both drives. Only move if going to NAS.

 

[samplenhold]

I have three 10TB WD purple drives for BI video storage. They are drives E, F, and G. I have a C drive (M.2 type of drive) that holds the BI database. Then I have a D drive which is an SSD NAND which holds JPG files and other files that I save from BI.

I divide up the 22 cams between the three HDDs, eight on one and seven on the other two. I do not use the Stored folder. I have renamed the different Aux folders and allocated the space accordingly.

New is E:\BlueIris\New
New2 is F:\BlueIris\New2
New3 is G:\BlueIris\New3

Do not change the New, Stored, or Alerts folder names in BI. Bad things will happen if you do.

 

[IAmATeaf]

One thing that is quite important is BI won’t move existingclips over from the old location to the new so either makes sure to delete the clips from the old drive if there is nothing of interest or move then over manually but you’ll need to perform a rebuild and reindex of the DB which will also mean that you’ll lose all your alerts.

 

[pbc]

One thing that is quite important is BI won’t move existingclips over from the old location to the new so either makes sure to delete the clips from the old drive if there is nothing of interest or move then over manually but you’ll need to perform a rebuild and reindex of the DB which will also mean that you’ll lose all your alerts.

Won't the drives eventually just write over the old clips?

 

[Flintstone61]

Re: Overwrite ...I'd like to think that is the case. yes.
Still do a DB rebuild after you get it going.

 

[samplenhold]

Won't the drives eventually just write over the old clips?

Yes. It only looks at the size of the disk and the dates of the files. Once the disk gets to the 'full' point, BI deletes the oldest files as needed. It does not matter if the cam is no longer writing to that disk.

The only reason to rebuild the DB is if you move files from one disk to another. But there is no reason to do that, really.

 

[Flintstone61]

Somebody with knowledge set the record str8t....thanks @samplenhold

 

[samplenhold]

Below is a capture from my BI log. Notice that the system checks every 5 minutes and does a delete if needed. Technically it does not overwrite a file. It deletes a file to make room. I have highlighted only the three disks that are for video. Sometimes it deleted one file. Sometimes nothing is deleted. And even once it deleted three files.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Re: Overwrite ...I'd like to think that is the case. yes.
Still do a DB rebuild after you get it going.

My personal experience has been that it won’t/doesn’t. What I found is that once you reconfigured the cam BI expects to find all clips for that cam in to e new location. So even clicking an existing clip would result in an error re clip no found.

 

[wittaj]

I think what Teaf was referring to is if you had say 2TB of files titled LPRxxx.bvr and Drivexxx.bvr on the existing drive and you moved those cameras (but not the existing files) to a new drive, then BI won't overwrite/delete the LPR and Drive bvr files on the previous drive as those are no longer under the clips/archive for that drive, so that drive now would have 2TB of existing files that will not be deleted by the BI clips/archive policy.

So he was recommending either manually moving those bvr files to the new drive or wipe the drive clean and then rebuild the DB.

 

[pbc]

I wiped both my drives a few weeks ago and rebuilt the databases as I had some allocation issues. No clips I want to keep on the existing drives since.

So hopefully I don't have to bother wiping and rebuilding. Sounds like I don't.

 

[samplenhold]

I think what Teaf was referring to is if you had say 2TB of files titled LPRxxx.bvr and Drivexxx.bvr on the existing drive and you moved those cameras (but not the existing files) to a new drive, then BI won't overwrite/delete the LPR and Drive bvr files on the previous drive as those are no longer under the clips/archive for that drive, so that drive now would have 2TB of existing files that will not be deleted by the BI clips/archive policy.

So he was recommending either manually moving those bvr files to the new drive or wipe the drive clean and then rebuild the DB.

Interesting. But that is not how it has worked for me. I have three drives. Originally (2018) had only one and all video was written to that drive. About a year later when I added the second drive, I split off half of the cams to write to that new drive. But I never deleted or moved the old video .bvr files. This was in July 2019. Then ten months later I installed the third drive (May 2020) and split off three cams from one drive and four cams from the other drive to the new drive. Again, I never deleted or moved the old files.

I just checked and there are no files older than 2/16/2023 on any of those drives.