Wow … This just happened to me. After years of using
Blue Iris satisfactorily without updating or upgrading I renewed my license last fall, and shortly thereafter I thought what the heck, I might as well get the latest update and play with what’s new. All good, but bang, a few months later I wake up with ½ a terabyte of BVRs gone. Wiped out. Just gone. Yup, BVRs. I have no clue why it happened now. Repair db didn’t do anything. Perhaps my disk approached a critical state. Earlier guesses in this thread about database misbehaving seem like good guesses.
This is just incredible. Yeah, this was not the latest “highly stable” update, and I was ready for a few glitches here and there. But releasing such an update, be it beta, alpha, release candidate or you name it, that massively wipes out all clips is not a little or even “medium, those do happen once in a while” glitch. It is a sign of a massive software development failure. These things just never happen outside the small circle of software developers working on the product. Just imagine IOS, Android, MSFT, meta, etc … or even “smaller” software, wiping out all your messages on a beta update.
Releasing updates often is done all the time in the software engineering world, nothing wrong with that. Typically
tools like continuous integration software, unit testing, etc … are used to make sure that while small bugs are impossible to eliminate and may still show up, massive failures are caught in time. It was not the case here, which leads one to believe that the developer(s) may not using such tools, which is, well, scary. Either that or it’s one of those “once in a lifetime” major hickup. Ouch.
I still plan on using BI, it’s worked well for me in the past, it doesn’t cost much and I don’t have the time nor want to spend the money for higher quality software needed for mission critical envirnoments. I use it for home, for security but also and mostly to checkout wildlife activity, and I have a modest set-up (only ½ a dozen cameras), and have backups anyways (although I did lose a day of clips). Oh well. And frankly, I still like it. It’s versatile, powerful, highly customizable, and fits my requirements, even after this. But lesson learned, just not “mission critical” grade. As long as one keeps that in mind one should be ok.
Perhaps the lessons learned here are these, imho:
- It’s ok for home use, but stay away if you running a mission critical environment. Imagine law enforcement using this. Not. Whether you update often or not.
- Do not trust the software from a security standpoint. I don’t want to even think of the potential security holes in it, starting with simple buffer overflows, etc … when this kind of failure happened, even it will never happen again. Not to mention that most IP cameras are running notoriously crappy and insecure firmware cloned from god knows how many asian bases, to start with. Dahua et al... If security is important to you at least minimize threats: Stay away from wifi, do not poke holes in your Internet router, use software like zerotier/vpn’s and the like if you need to access servers remotely.
- Back up, obviously. Yes it sucks to have to worry about this on typically dedicated machines with monster disk writes, and you may still loose a few clips given how difficult it is to continuously back up in real time. If you cannot afford to loose even one single clip, try syncing your bvrs, (syncthing or equivalent) but yeah, pita and it’s going to additionaly tax your server. This even if you restrict yourself to only updating with highly stable updates.
- Finally, but I am sure most have figured this out, lol, take advice from some people in this forum with some serious grains of salt, lol. Someone that will tell you that an iq above 80 is required and have no issue going full ad hominem on some, and tell you that this was expected given you loaded a non highly stable update, clearly have zero clue about modern software engineering. Acting like you somehow insulted their baby, both defensively and agressively, when they have nothing to do with BI’s development is a clear sign of, err, never mind ... Tells you all you need to know about them, to paraphrase earlier comment. Oh well, there’s one or more in every crowd, unfortunately. Just do some additional checking homework when following advice of such non experts.
My 2c, already way too long. Hope this helps some.
PS: Yup, I just signed up, although I’ve checked this forum sporadically for years. Just never felt the need to do so earlier as I never had any serious issues with BI.
