All my Alert clips are gone.

TheWaterbug

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BI 5.4.9.18 on Win10/64. 11 cameras, of which 9 are recording Continuously to a USB-connected box of 4 disks in an 8 TB Storage Space, which is currently 49% full of video (about a week's worth). Substreams and Direct-to-Disk are enabled on all cameras, and CPU is running <<<<20% on my Corei7-6700 when I'm not actively reviewing any footage, and RAM usage is 2 GB out of 16 GB installed.

My BI box either crashed or rebooted itself about 35 hours ago, on 9/5/21 at 10:37 PM, and now all of my motion-triggered Alerts are gone. The raw clips are there, and I can scrub through them just fine, but there are no Alerts contained within them. BI wasn't running from 9/5/21 at 10:37 PM until I restarted the BI app at 9:00 AM on 9/7/21, so there are no clips during that time, but there are clips from before the reboot and after the restart of the BI app.

If I click on the lightning bolt icon in the Clips window, it just says Empty List.

If I click on the All Clips button, then I get my last ~7 days worth of continuous recordings for all cameras.

If I click the lightning bolt again, I get Empty List.

I am 100% sure that there were Alerts in there, because I have videos that I exported from the BI box before it crashed, and those exports were the results of my daily review of Alerts.

But if I go back to that date and time in my recorded clips, that skunk is still there in the video, but there's no corresponding Alert in the timeline.

I tried Database: Compact/Repair, and then Database: Run Maintenance, and then Database: Repair/Regenerate, all without any positive effect. Finally I tried Database: Delete & Regenerate. No joy.

I walked out in front of one of my cameras and waved my arms, and now I have 1 Alert on that one camera, so things are working, but I'm wondering how the heck all of my Alerts got deleted, even though the videos did not.

Is there any way to regenerate the list of Alerts from the past 7 days? Or did I destroy that via Database: Delete & Regenerate?

Thanks!
 

bp2008

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Alerts are stored only in Blue Iris's clip database, so there is no way to get them back unless you had a backup of Blue Iris's database folder. Most likely the database got corrupted when Blue Iris crashed. Blue Iris crashes a lot on some people's systems (mine included) and database corruption is a lot more common problem than it should be -- lots of proper database systems with fault tolerance exist, but Blue Iris does not use one.

Anyway I recommend you set Blue Iris to run as a service so that it will automatically restart itself after a crash or PC reboot.
 

bp2008

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To be clear, it sounds like you did everything right to try to recover the database, and the only thing you could have done better is to keep periodic backups, which almost nobody does.
 

TheWaterbug

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Thanks! Not a huge loss, as I had downloaded the alert clips up until the 5th, so I'm really only missing a day of footage.

What database does BI run on?
 
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