Intermittent recordings

[Jed42]

I seem to be having a big problem recording continuously. It's in an out always, which makes my NVR system unreliable. We have had a lot of catholic converters stolen from our township lately don't want to be able to wake up in the morning and not see the recording of someone stealing something. Here is an example of the timeline.




Here is the spec of my rig



All recordings are saved on my NAS Via iscsi
Any thoughts TIA

 

[pauly7300]

I can't tell what time yours are stopping but I have recently noticed the same blocks of time where my 2 continuous recording cameras were not recording. I noticed they stop at 2 am which I now know is when my nightly maintenance runs. My recordings start again around 8 am which means my maintenance is taking over 6 hours. I think I have a prob with the DB so I'm probably going to rebuild the DB.

 

[fenderman]

I can't tell what time yours are stopping but I have recently noticed the same blocks of time where my 2 continuous recording cameras were not recording. I noticed they stop at 2 am which I now know is when my nightly maintenance runs. My recordings start again around 8 am which means my maintenance is taking over 6 hours. I think I have a prob with the DB so I'm probably going to rebuild the DB.

You definitely have a serious problem I would delete The database folder completely and let it rebuild itself. You can also schedule the maintenance to run only once a week. If your database is stored on an SSD which it should be along with the operating system and Blue Iris it should take less than a minute. Also note that if you have various profile set up you need to set the recording state that you wish in each profile.

 

[TonyR]

We have had a lot of catholic converters stolen from our township lately .....

"Catholic converters?"

 

[pauly7300]

Thanks @fenderman. Before you replied, I did a 'Repair/Regenerate' and i'm hopeful that will be it. My DB had been 31GB and after regenerating it's at 9GB. I'll know at 2 AM tomorrow... Will report back.

 

[wittaj]

Maybe also consider changing the maint time to a time you are up or a time that you wouldn't expect anything to happen (granted perps can strike at any time). As you are aware, during maintenance the cameras are not recording.

I do mine manually when I am on the console and watching the cameras.

 

[pauly7300]

Maybe also consider changing the maint time to a time you are up or a time that you wouldn't expect anything to happen (granted perps can strike at any time). As you are aware, during maintenance the cameras are not recording.

I do mine manually when I am on the console and watching the cameras.

Well, I hadn't been paying attention to the recordings in the night as of late and that's when I noticed these gaps of 6+ hours while maintenance is running.
So I decided to try what you suggested but now I can't get BI to stop. I had the BI Tools installed and had the watchdog turned on but even after turning it off I can't get the BI.exe to stay off. It restarts as soon as I end task on it. While it's running I can't delete the DB folder. Any suggestions?

 

[wittaj]

Open up Task Manager and then go to Services and stop it there. That should kill BI. Then restart and see if that takes care of it.

 

[pauly7300]

Open up Task Manager and then go to Services and stop it there. That should kill BI. Then restart and see if that takes care of it.

Well, I realized i had configured it to run as a service inside the BI Settings under 'Startup'. So I got it stopped and just moved the DB folder out of it's normal location. Then I rebooted and it looks like it's in the process of recreating the DB. I think I read somewhere that it may take quite a long time depending on how much video I have in storage which for me is 3TB in my 'New' folder. Then it moves to the 'Stored' folder where I keep 800GB there before deleting.

Any idea how long it might take? I don't find any indicator of progress other than the files in the DB folder growing. The clips.dat file was the largest I had (9.4 GB). At the rate it is growing, it's going to take days assuming it's going to get back to that size.

BTW, Thanks for the help on New Years Eve!!! HNY to you.

 

[wittaj]

Are you moving video on the same drive?

Unless you are moving it to a NAS you are better off leaving everything in NEW.

Most of us just leave everything in NEW. Moving files to STORED on same drive or another drive in the computer is wasting CPU % and wearing out the drives early.

If you have two HDD in the computer, you are better off splitting the cameras across the drives rather than using NEW and STORED.

I have several times more TB than you and when I rebuild a DB it is under 30min.

 

[fenderman]

Well, I realized i had configured it to run as a service inside the BI Settings under 'Startup'. So I got it stopped and just moved the DB folder out of it's normal location. Then I rebooted and it looks like it's in the process of recreating the DB. I think I read somewhere that it may take quite a long time depending on how much video I have in storage which for me is 3TB in my 'New' folder. Then it moves to the 'Stored' folder where I keep 800GB there before deleting.

Any idea how long it might take? I don't find any indicator of progress other than the files in the DB folder growing. The clips.dat file was the largest I had (9.4 GB). At the rate it is growing, it's going to take days assuming it's going to get back to that size.

BTW, Thanks for the help on New Years Eve!!! HNY to you.

Dont move the folder you dont want it or need it - its corrupt. Simply delete it then reboot your pc so the service stops and starts. That is an abnormal size for the database. BI should indicate a rebuild in the clips list. If nothing is showing, right click and select delete rebuild. For reference, and to give you a data point, I went ahead and rebuilt the DB from scratch on a system with 7TB of stored video - 2900 individual clip files. It took just over 10 minuets. The DB size is under 200MB - tiny. Understand that a db folder that is not made from scratch will be much larger as it has more data stored in it. I didnt check the size before I logged rebuilt this one. I just logged into another server with 13TB of storage and the DB is 4.9GB in size. Note this test was done on a system where BI, windows, and the database folder are stored on an SSD - as recommended.

 

[samplenhold]

As a data point:
My db folder is 6.26 GB, of which the clips.dat file is 6,555,259 KB. This is on an M.2 PCI-E drive
I have 3 x 10 TB HDDs which are at 99% for 'New' video in BVR format. Each one has about 2600 files.
I only do DB Compact/Repair on Thursdays at 10am.
What makes my repairs take a while is the number of 'Alerts' files. I have over 121 GB in more than 310k files. I use these jpgs for different things. Most are hourly snapshots for specific cams.

My rebuild this past Thursday took 13 min 21 secs.

 

[snoopynb]

I had a similar issue, only my DB had close to 2 million files due to JPG Alerts (much easier for me to browse through them for motion instead of watching video), although IIRC compact lasted up to an hour. Solved it by using the Post (separate tab) JPEG option (post to a folder) instead of JPEG on the Alerts tab. The folders go by date and are a subfolder in the same location where my video files are (for your purposes might even be better to use separate folder). Not as clean solution as storing them in database as it won't delete the JPEGs automatically, so you need to leave some extra empty space on the drive unallocated, and remember to occasionally delete the old ones, but solves the slow compact issue.