How long do you keep clips?

IReallyLikePizza2

Known around here
May 14, 2019
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Houston
Interested to see what people are doing. For my front and side cameras I can go back to June 30th, and my back cameras July 13th. So around 15 days for the less important cameras, and 30 days for the more important ones

Are you guys keeping clips for longer? Shorter?
 
Wow, that's a lot of clips! How often do you go back and view clips that old?
 
I know - I think I have a clip hoarding problem :) I do check every once and a while, I may go thru them and delete a few months of video just to clear up some space. No need to keep them if they aren't being viewed. I do like to look back at the changes in season occasionally.
 
I have a job in Blue Iris to take a snapshot for every camera in JPG format and put it on my NAS, nice to scroll through day by day and see what changed
 
I keep roughly 3.5 to 4 weeks of clips. They are setup to auto delete so no manual intervention. I have a residence not a business so have not identified what I would do with clips older than a month.

”I review mine every morning to see if anybody has been snooping around”
I used to do that and did not mind, but as the years went on it did become a rote chore. Today I use AI and that changed that dynamic 100%. I no longer need or feel the need to troll my own clip list. However, a few times a week I will do it any way just to make sure that everything is working as expected. Tough to fully ignore that OCD!
 
All of the video storage is tiered and triplicated. Edge recording provides anywhere from 7-21 days based on what the camera supports for storage & codec.

The same is stored on a VMS / NVR. That can store more than 12 months of video data.

All of the same data is streamed in parallel to a off site petabytes JBOD. The data and all my nightly back ups for various logs and images are relayed via PtP RF bridge several miles to my fathers home.

Last time I checked the capacity was pretty stupid like 5-8 years! The vast majority of the archive data is heavily compressed and hence the ability to store much longer historic data. One Node is set up to receive and keep raw data so it allows me to validate data without all the decompression work.

Like some of you some of the odd ball things I keep are seasonal changes. Or where I did something and kept it so the same could be converted into time lapse.

One thing I started doing a number of years ago was making videos of my family doing something and adding captions and later adding those into X-MAS stocking stuffers.

In a round about way it helped capture all of us living life, getting older, and just being able to review the past good & bad. This last winter and spring it really helped put into context as to how severe the weather was in my area.

I shared one video with a very close friend where I’m standing on 7 feet worth of snow and making walkways! Because there was no where to put the snow so had to go up!

Others were about lightning. Quite a number of years ago integrated several perimeter PTZ’s. Upon lightning detection they would move from guard / patrol to view the sky. Some would be locked in a fixed position in the sky. Whereas others would scan back and forth to capture the same.

The so called Big Plan is to publish a lightning video at some point.
 
I've got about a month worth of video, 24/7, on local storage. It's handled by BI and deleted automatically. I do review alerts every morning and if anything does crop up I run an export and store that on a separate drive that is backed up twice weekly.
 
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3 weeks worth of 24 cameras on 8TB western digital purple that Blue Iris deletes based on remaining disk space. Not all cameras record 24/7 but the must-have's do.
I use UI3 very morning to review alerts.
 
BI @ work. about 35-38 days.
BI @ home, I see video back to Feb,,,,LOL...
Ye olde DVR at work: 3.5 weeks. Caught three mail theft events in that time once we rolled back thru the time lines. It turned out to be very helpful in seeing the Mail theft Perps. When Karen W, found her bank of mail boxes ajar, we played back the timeline, and saw the perp...once we figured out what the hell was going on with mail fraud and people having Checks altered etc we found 3 events in 3.5 weeks. I'm glad I had that much time on ye Old Nightowl DVR. And my Jidetech PTZ had the outdoor shots, but being a Noob I didn't have it setup right for night. kinda useless video. but we could see it was a Honda CRV from 2003-2006 generation.
 
I have folders that I create on the C drive, when a new event becomes Save-worthy.
Usually referenced by plate#, or event...114 hits rock, Coyotes etc...
 
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retaining video clips honestly depends on what you want.
If peaceful serene low crime no troubles area, no need to go 14 days or 30 days.
But if you have crime, issues, bums, homeless vagrants mulling about, or suspicious people all the time, 30+ days for sure.
 
I certainly don't need to save from February. but its an 8TB drive on 9 cams. I'll just let it do it's thing, when it comes time to Overwrite.