Alerts being deleted and not moved

[n2qew]

Noticed that alerts only went back 7 days. Ultimately determined the setting "Limit clip age" under Folders -> Alerts actually controls how long Alerts are retained. The page makes it appear that it should move them to the "Stored" folder even though there's nothing actually in the alerts folder. Nothing in help actually says this is how it works unless I'm missing something.

Is this how it's supposed to work, and it's just not documented - again unless I'm missing it - or is this a bug?

 

[wittaj]

The alerts you see in BI are actually just pointers to the DB, so the Alerts folder will be empty unless you are saving hi-rez photos or burning AI images. Probably something with your STORED retention policy that is deleting them.

Unless you are using a NAS, you shouldn't put anything in STORED and then just let it delete based on storage space and not days.

That goes for NEW as well. Do not move NEW to STORED if they are on the same drive or drive within the PC - only if going to a NAS.

 

[n2qew]

The alerts you see in BI are actually just pointers to the DB, so the Alerts folder will be empty unless you are saving hi-rez photos or burning AI images. Probably something with your STORED retention policy that is deleting them.

Unless you are using a NAS, you shouldn't put anything in STORED and then just let it delete based on storage space and not days.

That goes for NEW as well. Do not move NEW to STORED if they are on the same drive or drive within the PC - only if going to a NAS.

I don't see anything in the STORED config that seems like it would cause deletion of alerts. It's set for 30 days. I did notice that "NEW" config had 7 set, but files there would never make it to 7 days as it's only 150 gig, and that's a couple of days at most. I've since set that to 30 also even though I don't see how that should affect alerts. Again, if those limits are hit, the next stage is STORED. Screenshots below. Can you see anything I'm missing. It definitely deleted alerts 7 days to approximately the hour if the "Limit Clips Age was set to 7 days. BTW.. New only has about 20gig in it of the 150 because I set it to 20 gig temporarily to push most of it to NAS. I did that to see if any affect on Alerts / Clips. There was none.

 

[looney2ns]

See this: Blue Iris Storage configuration

Setting 4gb for size limit is nothing when it comes to video file sizes.

 

[n2qew]

Yup. That would be something less than an hour if it involved video. The only thing I have set to 4 GB is for the Alerts. I had changed that from it's default of 1 GB during troubleshooting the disappearing alerts problem. As there's actually nothing in the \BlueIris\Alerts folder, setting that to whatever makes no difference. However, setting the Limit Clip Age under Alerts does make the alerts go away beyond whatever is set there. I've got it set to 30 days now, and so far, it's not stripping the alerts,
On my system, New is 150 GB set to move to Stored which points to an 80 GB NAS and Stored is set - for now - to delete at 3 TB or 30 days. Will tune that later.

 

[n2qew]

I got confirmation from Blue Iris support that what I was observing WAS how the software worked. That is, if not saving alerts as files, then the Alerts will be deleted according to the value entered on the Alerts config page. By default that was 7 days, so the furthest back in time for alerts would be 7 days. They said that is changed with the "current release". More specifically: " In the current version, alerts are NOT deleted according to these rules as long as the parent CLIP still exists. Once the parent clips is deleted, the alert age/folder size settings become relevant, as the alert is now "on its own".

 

[flixxx]

Thank you for this, it helped me get to the bottom on why my alerts were being deleted but the clips were still available.

I didn't realise the data files for the database were being saved in the "alerts" section of the configuration. I had it limited to 1 GB because i was not intending to use that folder and as it turned out i had 1 GB of data files in there for the alerts.

I've since increased the storage and should now have alerts lasting longer than a few days.