Migrating HikVision PCNVR content to a bigger HDD

[lunokhod]

Hi Everybody,

I'm wondering if anyone here knows if it's possible to migrate existing video captured via the HikVision PCNVR software to a new/bigger HDD.

At the moment I have a 500GB RAID1 array on my server PC dedicated for PCNVR. I'm planning on adding a bigger RAID1 array in a few weeks, but I don't want to simply throw away all the existing captured video.

Has anyone done this?

Michael.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Macrium 'Reflect' free version works pretty well for cloning discs.
As do a few other free similar products.

 

[lunokhod]

Macrium 'Reflect' free version works pretty well for cloning discs.
As do a few other free similar products.

Ahh yes, I have no problems with cloning the content of the existing HDD.

I want to know if HikVision PCNVR will take advantage of the extra space. When you set up a HDD for use with PCNVR (pre allocate), the free space of the drive is taken up with .MP4 files that are progressively written to as incoming video arrives from IP cameras.

This pre-allocation seems to be a once only affair... once it has been done to a drive, you can't do it again. I don't know if you preallocate a new drive with cloned files from the old drive if PCNVR will ignore the old content when doing searches on past video.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Oh, OK, I misunderstood what you were looking for.
I've not studied how PCNVR works - but it sounds similar to the NetHDD scheme for NAS storage where the placeholder files initially created are catalogued in an index.