Hard Drive Replacement

Marcelor73

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I just got a new hard drive. My current set up has Blue Iris installed on the main drive (same as where Win10 is installed) and all of my storage is on a separate drive.

If I'm only replacing the storage drive, will it just be "plug and play" if I keep the folder structure exactly the same? I.e., copy old drive contents into new drive, remove old drive, reboot.

Thanks in advance.
 

bp2008

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Yes. You wouldn't even need to reboot. Just stop the Blue Iris service, exchange the drive letters in Windows, and then start Blue Iris again. In fact you could even do this step before you start copying video, and probably not break anything. But you won't be able to access old clips through Blue Iris until they copy over.
 

SouthernYankee

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Put the new dive in.
Add the folders for BI, same names you should be good to go.
If needed increase the folder size in BI if the disk is larger,

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

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.


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.
 

sebastiantombs

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Be ready for a long time spent copying. I was going to do that a few weeks ago when I added an 8TB, already had a 4TB storing video. Two thirds of the cameras were being moved to the new drive, so I set them to copy to the new drive. It would have taken the better part of a day. I just dumped it all, reformatted the old drive and started fresh.
 

Marcelor73

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Put the new dive in.
Add the folders for BI, same names you should be good to go.
If needed increase the folder size in BI if the disk is larger,

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

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.


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.

Thanks! One more question. I "selected all" the clips for one particular camera and I went to right-click but instead of selecting "Delete" I accidently locked over 10K clips. Now when I select all again and try to un-protect, either nothing happens or BI crashes. Can I delete the files directly on the HD when I work on the transfer? Or will that mess up indexing in BI?
 

bp2008

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Yeah you can delete the files from the HD, but remnants will still exist in Blue Iris's clip database so you'll see them in the clip list but they won't be openable. Blue Iris's clip database is really rudimentary and not robust, hence the trouble you've had trying to unprotect things. You're lucky if it isn't simply corrupt now.
 

Flintstone61

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I copied over a 5TB WD EZRz drive to a 6TB WDEZAZ last week. i wanted the 5TB for a BI Pc....I decided to scan it first with Windows defender. That took 1.2 days. :sleepy: then I "moved" the data to a clean 6T drive ( found three vulnerabilities imgburn file with some kinda issue, and a couple others from old downloads of partitioning software, like unwanted ability to package additional programs unknown to the user or someshit. that took 26 hours. i had suspected the 5TB was getting flaky. because my main PC is usually pretty fast. It was a dynamic drive that had previously been part of a mirror. I spent a lot of time fiddling around with Cmd line and google and you tube trying to revert a dynamic drive back to a basic volume.
the 6TB stabilized my PC. So i suspect the dynamic drive was acting up somehow ( long file searches, Not responding messages etc.) Now that its been converted to a Basic GPT disk and is recording BI files it seems ok again.
 
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bp2008

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When the video disk in my continuous-recording BI box was failing, it would cause the system to completely freeze at random times for random durations ranging from a fraction of a second to about 1 minute. It was very worrying, as this Blue Iris box was a virtual machine running in unraid, and the freezing affected all active virtual machines at once!
 

IAmATeaf

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When I replaced one of my 2Tb drives with a 6Tb the copy took over 8 hours, bloody 8 hours.

The worst thing is that when it finally finished and I replaced the drive with the new 6Tb I actually took out the wrong drive so I ended up with the same content on the new 6Tb drive as in the other 2Tb drive but didn’t discover this until the PC was back in the loft.

Needless to say I just trashed the content on the 2Tb and reindexed the DB as by now it was 10pm and I just couldn’t be arsed with climbing into the loft to change drives over.
 

sebastiantombs

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^^^^ I've started labeling drives with their purpose/content to avoid problems like that.
 
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