On-Net Surveillance Systems, Inc.
NetDVMS 6.5f User Manual
Input, Events & Output
66
If the device to which the camera is attached is not a video encoder device with several channels, the
video encoder channel indication in the sub-directory named after the device's MAC address will
always be _1. Example: (e.g. 00408c51e181_1)
Storing Archives at Other Locations than the Default
Archiving Directory
You are of course also able to store archives at other locations than locally in the default archiving
directory. You may, for example, specify that your archives should be stored on a network drive.
When archiving to other locations than the default archiving directory, NetDVMS will first store the
archive in the local default archiving directory, then immediately move the archive to the archiving
location you have specified.
While this may at first glance seem unnecessary, it greatly speeds up the archiving procedure, which
will reduce delays in case of network problems. Archiving directly to a network drive would mean that
archiving time would vary depending on the available bandwidth on the network. First storing the
archive locally, then moving it, ensures that the archiving is always performed as fast as possible.
If archiving to a network drive, note the regular camera database must still be stored on a local drive,
i.e. a drive attached directly to the computer running the NetDVMS system.
Archiving Audio
If audio is enabled on a device, audio from the device will also be archived. If the device is a video
encoder with several channels, audio will be archived with the camera on channel 1.
When an audio source is enabled, audio is recorded to the associated camera’s database. This will
affect the database’s capacity for storing video. It is thus important to bear in mind that the maximum
limit of the database is likely to be reached earlier if recording audio and video than if only recording
video. It is thus a very good idea to use archiving if using audio sources. You may also want to archive
more frequently if recording audio and video than if only recording video.
Storage Capacity Required for Archiving
The storage capacity required for archiving depends entirely on the amount of recordings you plan to
archive.
Some organizations want to keep archived recordings from a large number of cameras for several
months or years. Other organizations may only want to archive recordings from one or two cameras,
and they may want to keep their archives for much shorter periods of time.
Before enabling archiving, you should always consider the storage capacity of the local drive
containing the default archiving directory to which archives are always moved, even though they may
immediately after be moved to an archiving location on a network drive: As a rule of thumb, the
capacity of the local drive should be at least twice the size required for storing the databases of all
cameras for which archiving has been specified.
When archiving data from a camera to external locations, including archiving locations on network
drives, NetDVMS automatically checks that the space required for data to be archived plus 1 GB of
free disk space per camera is available at the external location. If not, the external archive location's
oldest data from the camera in question will be deleted until there is sufficient free space for the new
data to be archived.
