How do you use BI?

[toejam]

My old security system (Lorex system) continuously recorded all cameras and overwrote older recordings as the hard drive got full. I've setup BI to record on triggers and NOT record continuously. I'm currently sitting on 10 cameras and have BI setup to store trigger recordings to a Synology NAS with > 2TB of free space. Since I have not used BI to continuously record all cameras, I'm not sure how long it'll take to fill up my NAS. I'm assuming BI can overwrite older recordings as the hard drive fills.

I'm curious how others are using their BI software to record their security cameras - continuously or just on triggers, or a combination of both? If you do record continuously, how big is your storage drive?

 

[bp2008]

I run two instances of BI (on two separate computers). One of these records only on triggers (motion triggers). The other, I have recording 4 sub streams continuously to a little 1 TB drive, and I fit something like two weeks of video in 700 GB that way because they are low bit rate streams. This is just a backup system and I rarely look at it. It just purrs along and erases old video to make room for new.

 

[toejam]

Do you have the continuously recording setup to delete files after a date or by drive capacity?

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Do you have the continuously recording setup to delete files after a date or by drive capacity?

 

[bp2008]

I have it configured to limit the size of the "New" folder to 400GB and 7 days age. Upon hitting either limit it is supposed to move the clips to the "Stored" folder.
The "Stored" folder has a limit of 500 GB or 14 days age, and is supposed to delete clips after that.

It turns out BI was misbehaving. It had a ton of clips left over from last October, February, and March. They weren't showing up in the Clips list until I manually forced it to repair/regenerate the clip database. Within about 20 minutes of finishing the database repair, it automatically moved the older clips out of "New" and into "Stored", then a few minutes later, deleted the older ones from "Stored". So now it is back to normal behavior. Part of the reason behind the failure has to be that the USB drive it records to sometimes dismounts itself and I don't notice for days or weeks. I'm thinking that happened in October and again in February and BI never properly recovered. It is supposed to repair the clip database every day at 2 AM, but I guess it wasn't doing that. This box is still running BI 3.66 which is quite old now, so maybe the most recent versions of BI are better about it. Anyway I just reconfigured it to keep everything in the "New" folder, up to 700 GB, with no age limit, and delete when the size limit is reached. This is a little simpler than the previous configuration so hopefully it is more reliable.

 

[toejam]

The cameras can be setup to do continuous recording to the NAS. Is there a reason I'd want to use my cpu cycles and setup BI to do continuous recording when the camera already supports that function?

 

[bp2008]

If BI does the recording, then you can easily view the clips through BI, BI's mobile apps, and BI's web interface. Using the direct to disk recording mode, it doesn't cost that much CPU time to record ... if you had the camera loaded in BI regardless. The expensive part is just having a camera loaded in BI.