Clip and archiving just new

[bishop20012]

Greetings
Regarding clips and archiving is it possible to just set New to like 400gb and stored and alerts to 0. I dont need to move clips I cant just delete them. Will this approach work and just keep 400gb worth of captures?
Thanks

 

[SouthernYankee]

400 gb is not very much storage. How many cameras and what is the frame rate and Iframe values on the camera ? Are you continously recording or are you recording on just events, alerts.

Most users do not used stored folder if it is on the same physical drive as the New folder.

====================================

My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.
10) for performance do not put more than about 10,000 files in a folder, the search and adding files will eat CPU and disk performance. Look at using a sub folder per camera (see &CAM in bi help)


Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.
======================================

 

[bishop20012]

400 gb is not very much storage. How many cameras and what is the frame rate and Iframe values on the camera ? Are you continously recording or are you recording on just events, alerts.

Most users do not used stored folder if it is on the same physical drive as the New folder.

====================================

My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.
10) for performance do not put more than about 10,000 files in a folder, the search and adding files will eat CPU and disk performance. Look at using a sub folder per camera (see &CAM in bi help)


Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.
======================================

9 cameras. 15fps. Iframe is 50. Not continuous recording. Just motion detection alerting

 

[sebastiantombs]

Match the iframe rate to the frame rate. The way you have it set, only one full frame is sent to every three plus partial frames. This can easily result in missed motion events.

 

[bishop20012]

Will do. Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

15fps. Iframe is 50.

Match the iframe rate to the frame rate. The way you have it set, only one full frame is sent to every three plus partial frames. This can easily result in missed motion events.

That is 3.333 seconds between iframes (not 3 frames). iframe interval of 50 means every 50th frame is an iframe.

 

[bp2008]

Greetings
Regarding clips and archiving is it possible to just set New to like 400gb and stored and alerts to 0. I dont need to move clips I cant just delete them. Will this approach work and just keep 400gb worth of captures?
Thanks

Yes, the default configuration where clips move from New to Stored is unnecessary in most systems (like @SouthernYankee said in point #2).

I believe the Alerts folder is only used if you select Hi-res JPEG files in the trigger tab of camera properties like this:



Otherwise with it set to "Database only" on all cameras, the Alerts folder should remain empty anyway so you don't need to allocate space for it.

 

[Pogo]

Just experienced a rather frustrating and completely unforeseen issue while creating a couple HDD clip folders on a new BI installation. Everything was set to default except limit size and clip age which I changed slightly. I left 'db', 'new' and 'alerts' on the SSD and moved 'stored' to the HDD along with creating a 'saved' folder to dump a handful of clips to sort through later without having to worry about time or size limits on the storage. Just to be safe, I toggled off the age limit setting and manually moved the files from 'stored' to 'saved'.

Surprise!!! They were immediately deleted -- as in destroyed deleted.

Evidently the 'delete' radio button being selected in conjunction with de-selecting clip age limit is the equivalent of permanent file deletion without warning when applied to a new folder. I can't imagine I'm the only one who's experienced this. Sure seems like there would be a flag or warning about this particular combination of settings to minimize the risk of important video being lost all the time by such an inadvertent action. I lost the two clips I'd been waiting nearly two weeks to capture. Now I'm faced with having to pay through the nose for a recovery program to retrieve the files. Fortunately, they're on a freshly formatted drive and File Scavenger finds em in 2 seconds -- then wants 60 bucks for a license key to recover em.

Just a heads up for anyone else who's trying to roll their own HDD directories to move existing files around. I'd also add that the new 'saved' folder was a renamed 'Aux 1' from the folders list and not just a random new file created in the HDD drive main directory itself. Could the settings attributes perhaps have been auto-implemented since the path and filename of the new folder were also entered into the associated entry field?

May be something the developer may want to look into.

Sure sucks for me right now.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Just keep the data base on the SSD. Move everything else to platter drives, surveillance rated platter drives. Do not set deletion based on age. Instead use size only. Blue Iris does an excellent job handling the database and clip storage. It is pointless to move things from New to Stored, especially if they're on the same drive. Just allocate as much space as possible, like the full drive capacity minus 5-10% for overhead, and be done with it. The KISS principal applies here. If you can, before you start saving files to your, hopefully, surveillance rated drive reformat it with a block size of 1024 rather than default. Video files are quite large and it makes "housekeeping" easier for the drive.

If you haven't already read the material in the WiKi, in the blue bar at the to of every page, do so before proceeding. It will save you a lot of frustration.

 

[Flintstone61]

If your capacity setting was already maxed for New, and the age was unchecked, it may have been complying with your request based on settings you chose.
Seems like your really scrimping on storage device size... and super worried about recovering possibly " dead footage" that may not be anything worth saving anyway.

 

[Flintstone61]

You should realistically have like a 4-8 Terabyte surveillance drive then you don't have to monkey around with all the bullshit.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I forgot to mention, Blue Iris likes to see the directory structure match the names used in clips and archiving, like New, Stored, Alerts specifically. The AUX directories can be renamed right in clips and archiving to make them easier to remember what your storing there. I use a drive letter and New for additional drives. Makes it really easy to track what's going where that way.

 

[Pogo]

I get all that for the most part. And I'm getting there with the build.

I simply wanted to move two files from a cluster**** of clips to a location where I could edit the video and then get the rest sorted out accordingly. I've read the wiki. I've read the manual help files. I've seen nothing providing a warning of the caveat I described.

It was two files for me. It could be disaster for someone else trying to manually move a bunch.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Never, ever, ever manually move files. Copy, maybe or do an export in whatever format you need, but never, ever move them. The database will go crazy doing that!

 

[Pogo]

No big red warning popped up to tell me otherwise. And you weren't around to hold my hand.

Point is, what happened shouldn't have -- at least not without a warning about the possible consequences.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Think about it. It's controlled by a database that tracks where the files are among a lot of other specifics about the files. You moved them and it has no way to know that.

 

[Pogo]

Data bases store stuff and are managed by external engines. They don't control anything. This was an action, not a relational reference error causing a database to delete something. And when I say I manually moved the files, I used the 'move' function in the context menu. It works as you would expect it to when there's a clip age limit for deletion, recycle, or move , It'll delete the clip if there's no limit set and the radio button is set to 'delete'.

Shouldn't happen without at least a warning -- or a lock actually prohibiting the action altogether.

Maybe someone should put it in the wiki.

 

[sebastiantombs]

If you remove something that is expected by the database "engine" to be there, unpredictable results can happen. Bi uses a database system custom to BI, not sql or anything else. Blaming this on BI when it is clearly user error, removing the files, won't bring your other files back. You simply made a mistake, end of story.

If you set things up properly and handle the files properly things like this won't happen. You are the only person I can recall having this problem.

 

[Pogo]

You don't pay attention. I used the "Move" function in the BI context menu that is associated with the actual clip itself. I selected the intended drive that was clearly an available option as determined by BI. With no clip limit set and the radio button set to delete, the clips vaporized. Set a clip limit, the clip goes to the intended destination.

Try it yourself. Choose a real important clip. Let us know how it works out for you.

Sheesh.

 

[sebastiantombs]

As I have said, moving files isn't a good idea. Period end of story DO what you want, I can only offer you advice based on my experience. When I've need a file "moved from BI I use copy or I export as an AVI. Simple painless. You want to move them, be my guest and enjoy the results.

One other comment, when you moved the file did you move it to another directory in BI or to one outside of the BI structure?