Archival options

[Ritmo2k]

Does zoneminder have any facility to allow nearline storage of data without archiving the events out to a video and deleting them? I need to provide users the ability to review old data however the disk storage for events is insufficient for all the needed retention.

Thanks!

[knight-of-ni]

The only way to keep events and save storage space at the same time is to export them.

Your users can turn on the Archive bit for important events, which will prevent them from being auto deleted, but that doesn't solve your storage problem.

Why not add more drives? Hard drives are relatively cheap.

Note that we are working on writing events straight to an mp4 container, which will save a ton of space. You will have to wait a while for this before it is ready, however.

[Ritmo2k]

Hi,
The zm server is running within a vsphere cluster and its not economical to use its storage.
I can easily add nfs space, but its all or nothing. It would be nice to allow multiple locations and let an event move data but allow it to be seen by a user when viewing a timeline.

Without me hacking something up, does an offline viewer exist that would allow the structure of pictures saved to be viewed by a user for a given location?

Thanks.

[knight-of-ni]

ZoneMinder only supports a single storage location. You will need to set up the underlying filesystem to support your requirements.

No one is forcing you use the storage inside the virtual cluster.

If you don't want to use vmware's vsan product, you can add a NAS. Any NAS will do. Your choice if you want buy a commercial NAS product, but even freeNAS supports HA mode.

freeNAS + ZFS + nfs + HA mode would be one way to build a remote filesystem that can can be grown or shrunk via quotas.

There are other ways. I've seen discussion on our IRC channel of others using glusterfs if you want distributed storage locations.