(Also posted this as a wiki request at http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=46944 but it occurs to me this might make a great inbuilt feature too.)
An autoexport_path option on the webgui.
If set, exports archived events as video to that directory once per day or even immediately, if they don't already exist.
There could be a dropdown option to select video type and quality.
Reasoning: People archive important events. These are not expired by default but are at risk of disk failure especially if using LVM or mdadm to build large arrays. (It's happened to me a few times).
Backing up the entire events directory and database is not an option (I'm currently using 3tb for zm alone)
Backing up one directory which holds the *important* stuff would be very easy.
Therefore, if we do lose a disk - yes, we lose the zoneminder record and stills, but we don't lose the actual event details which would be on a different folder (which could be mounted remotely or on a different physical disk) in an entirely self-contained file.