Ok.. So I was able to get Avigilon going on our server and it's working like a charm even though the cameras have only been online for a few hours. However, I'd like to remove the video clips I took while playing with the cameras -- I noticed that Avigilon ate up about 650G -- some of that I'm thinking may be to support/preallocate the required space that they need to do their recordings.. I checked the users guide but didn't see any way to delete recordings.. Keep in mind I'm a newbie in this area and may not have the philosophy down quite yet.. Anyway, just thought I'd ask.. I've since dropped the framerate down to 15 (from 30) and enabled motion detection to ensure the cameras don't free-run which ought to help.

P.S. I'll need to add a few more disks to this server I'm thinking -- perhaps 4Tb ought to help..?

Thx!

There are 2 ways to delete recorded video. 1) delete the data base using ACC administration or 2) in the "recording and bandwidth" page unlink the camera and change the Max. Record Time to 1 day. After 24 hours you the video for that camera will be deleted.

Avigilon does this for a reason. Deleting video should not be a easy task.

*edit

If you wanna change the recorded data base size (which it sounds like you want to do because there is NO way 4 analog cameras filled up 650GB of storage in a couple of days) do that in ACC Administration which is located on on your server.

Thanks! I figured that 'delete' feature was not going to be an easy to find item for the reason you state. I'll admit that I was also amused to find the data base taking up that much space for <30 minutes of video from a single camera (in this case).. Seems like (and I think you confirm) that they effectively pre-allocate the space to avoid those -- oops -- ran out of space moments.. I'll look into this tonight when I get home..

When you first set it up, it asks how much of a disk you want to use. I think the default is around 80%. It's easy to reduce that size in the admin app.

I don't know how Avigilon does it, but some systems pre-allocate files for the video, then write the video data into those blocks of files. This has the advantage of avoiding disk fragmentation, as the original files can be created as single contiguous chunks of disk.

That how Avigilon does it
standard proprietary data base structure
with few levels of recovery

yeah.. I was poking around in the video folder it created and it reminded me of an enterprise wide document management system I used to work on (as a software developer -- my day job) -- lots of directories,nested files,etc.. I didn't look at Avigilon's that closely but it looked similar in structure in an effort to avoid issues with too many files in single directories,etc..

I will admit that I was a bit hasty in setting things up and may have missed the dialog asking how much to allocate -- I do recall it asking where to put the archive since I've got two drives on this system -- one a super small SSD and the other a 2TB drive..

All Windows-based NVRs will likely do this. Windows will slow to a crawl if there are a large number of files in one directory.

Best,
Christopher

correct.. it's been a few years since I did any windoze development. Regardless, I was able to shut it down this evening and resize the data down from 640Gb to something closer to 250Gb for now until I get a dedicated drive.. Overall, very nice software..

Vigil does it with several levels of folders - F:\Data\20120330\08\014412.mjp, for example, would be March 30, 2012, 08:44:12am, camera 2 (first two digits of filename is the channel number, counting from 00).

VideoInsight and GeoVision do something similar.

Several years ago, prior to selecting an NVR application, I pushed the images from a couple cameras to a RAID system using ftp. The file system was too flat, and there were too many files in each directory. When it came time to either review some of the images or delete them, it took hours and hours. If I tried to delete a large number of files at once, the system would effectively hang. If I deleted only a few files at a time, it would eventually complete the deletion, but many files would remain. There was other information on the disk, so I could not simply wipe everything. It took many hours to clean up the mess I had created. Lesson learned. Never put a large number of files in one directory.

Managing a large number of images and videos is extremely fast when properly designed. The Avigilon video database is one such example. Adobe Lightroom is another. I have 78,000 images and videos in my Lightroom database, and I can pull up any image/video instantly using a variety of search features.

Best,
Christopher