Blue Iris Cloud and Local Backup Plans - Best Practices

[eggzlot]

Hi All,

I have BI running on a Win 10 PC. I have a new Synology RS818+ and looking at best practices to back it up to the RS818+ and potentially the cloud too (have yet to pick a cloud service but the popular ones all work with Synology).

I have reserved 5 TB on the Win 10 PC. That is basically enough to store 3 cameras of 24x7 recording for several weeks (maybe months, been so long I forget). Either way, I likely only need 1-2 weeks worth of the data backed up to the cloud (or even the RS818) not sure I need all 5 TB backed up. How would I go about only backing up a piece locally and to the cloud.

Or am I approaching this all wrong, I am up for suggestions.

 

[Mr_D]

That's a lot of data to push up to the Internet. Can your connection handle it both in terms of data rate and monthly cap? Are you backing up to guard against the drive failing in the BI machine or theft/destruction of the BI machine? I'm just planning on recording motion events to an SD card in each camera to guard against the BI machine getting taken out during a break-in.

 

[eggzlot]

I dont know what I am looking for - I guess guidance on best practices. Again I dont need a 2 month old 8 hour video clip on the cloud. Im aware of that. Basically if someone robbed me and took my server or PC and broke it, id like some sort of backup. Maybe people only back up to a NAS and do not bother with cloud backup. That's possible too. Dropbox business is $20/month for unlimited storage...i already have 2-3 TB of stuff without BI to back up, so at $20/month its not awful

 

[bp2008]

Unless you're paying for dedicated bandwidth, your ISP is probably not going to like continuous video upload even of 1 camera let alone 3. You should realize that 1 Mbps continuously for a month is 328 gigabytes. You're likely to be closer to 3-6 Mbps per camera which is 1-2 terabytes of video per camera per month. Even if you are never going to view that video, even if you are only going to keep it for 1 day, you still have to upload it all.

You can do local or offsite backup just fine though as long as you are doing it only on motion detection. Blue Iris supports automatic FTP backup of new clips. So I would suggest duplicating your cameras in Blue Iris and have the duplicates set to record on motion only. Set up an FTP server in the main Blue Iris Options panel, FTP servers tab. Then in the Clips and archiving tab click the Configure button next to the Queue for backup checkbox at the bottom.

You can configure it something like this:

Finally in each camera properties you can go to the Record tab and check the box "Queue new clips for backup". You'll only want to do this for the motion-triggered clones, not for cameras that record continuously.

 

[bp2008]

There is one caveat about Blue Iris FTP clip backup, it won't auto-delete old clips from the FTP server so you need to do that some other way. Myself, I just go in manually when the drive is nearing full and clear out the old stuff.

 

[Taigar]

Is the functionality of the FTP still the same? I would like to have auto-delete, so I can set and forget this.
(backup 'New' clips to an already available NAS, in another building)