ZoneMinder Forums

Philip,

This looks like a very intriguing and impressive program!

I have a few general questions as I have not setup or configured ZoneMinder yet.

1) What is the recommended method to "backup" data ie. streamed files and images?
For instance, if my house is burglurized and my computer is stolen or disk drives rendered useless, how would I be able to keep a second copy "offsite"? Originally I planned just to stream the video into a .avi file and ftp the video file to another computer every few minutes which would allow me to retrieve it if my computer is stolen.

2) How is streamed data stored?
Judging from the schema, I can see individual frames are stored as TablePath in the FRAMES table, but I don't see where a streamed image is stored. Are they stored or only available for "live" viewing? Is a stream just comprised of the individual frames?

3) What is the recommended disk space for storing the MySql Tables?

Thanks alot for putting this project together. I look forward to trying it!

I think I can answer some of these...

1) There isn't any special trick to backup zoneminder's created files from any other file on your system. It's all about bandwidth vs frequency of events + size of events. If you don't get much traffic and you've got the bandwidth, rsync would be an easy to impliment service. http://samba.org/rsync/ Otherwise, you have the ability to ftp or e-mail events based upon filter settings. This paragraph is taken from the README:

"If you do this then the subsequent dialog will also allow you specify whether you want this filter automatically applied in order to delete events or upload events via ftp to another server and mail notifications of events to one or more email accounts. In most cases you can specify your preferences for upload formats and email content during configuration time (make sure you type '?' to get help on options). Emails and messages (essentially small emails intended for mobile phones or pagers) have a variety of tokens that can be substituted for various details of the event that caused them. This includes links to the event view or the filter as well as the option of attaching images or videos to the email itself. See the included templates zmconfig_eml.txt and zmconfig_msg.txt for a fuller explanation of the availability and meaning of these tokens."

2) Yes, each frame is an individual jpg frame (plus some special jpg images which shows what analysis was done). They are stored in a directory within apache's reach by monitorname/eventnumber. Streaming is done using the html server push standard that Mozilla/Netscape/Opera? can handle otherwise it requires a java app for Internet Explorer. Now, with that said, Philip also put in the ability to generate an mpeg from the frames but due to filesize and processor utilization, hasn't really made it a primary function of ZoneMinder. You can generate the mpeg inside of the same window you use to view the event. Again, Philip comments about this in the README.

3) I'd be more worried about disk space from the events themselves... according to "ls -Al|gawk '{x+=$5;print x " bytes"}'|tail -n 1" from the contents of my /var/lib/mysql/zm dir I'm using 319375 bytes.