More Archive Questions

[jwood.ok]

I had a prior discussion on here where I asked some about looping time vs expiration and believe I discovered that the expiration date doesn't really matter when you are looping because an archive will stay forever and just overwrite itself, as I understand it.

1) To further clarify some things though, shouldn't a looped archive of two weeks have a first frame of two weeks ago?  I have a loop that has been running for a long time (a couple of years), is set to a loop duration of 2 weeks and yet it has a first frame time of only 6 days ago, so I'm trying to understand why I don't get the full 2 weeks out of it.

2) Another question I had, what reasons would their be to have both a motion archive as well as a regular archive?  I suppose if you ONLY wanted to see when there was movement?  When I took over doing this work I found that at one of our locations, most of the cameras had two archives, a normal archive and a "motion" archive.  Not only that but the duration of the motion archive only is listed as 1 hour, which seems kind of pointless.  Unless perhaps the only reason to have it is to pop up a notification and allow a person on duty a chance to briefly go back and see what the motion was, but if that were the case it seems they could use the regular archive?

3) And finally, I have some other archives in my list that have really odd durations (12.3 hours?) Since such a duration isn't an option, is this being dictated by available space or some other factor?

[Scott Olsen]

Hi jwood,

It sounds like you're talking about VSM 6.X, but if I'm mistaken, please let me know.

1) Yes, a consistently running loop archive should have a first frame time of approximately (Current DateTime - Loop Duration).  If the VSMS instance is pressed for storage and at capacity, it could be prematurely groomed.

2) Well, there are a few logistical reasons for this; primarily to have an absolute, 100% continuous recording, where there is no question of "missed" motion detection.  From a technical perspective, for any motion based archives, there is always going to be at least a small continuous loop of several minutes (I believe 7min is smallest, but don't hold me to it).  This is due to the way the video data is committed to disk on the VSMS platform.  It also allows other internal daemons to perform event processing and flag video data that should be retained beyond the duration of the continuous loop.

3) I think there could be a couple reasons for this, but I couldn't say for certain without more detail on the specific archive in question.  Was it manually stopped/shelved? Is the VSMS instance on which it resides oversubscribed and is being prematurely groomed as a result?

I hope this provides some assistance to you.

Cheers from hurricane ravaged Atlantic Canada!