ZoneMinder Forums

I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion on how to approach the problem of capturing event data and images in case the local machine running zoneminder does not survive the "event".

I have two computers running zoneminder each with its own set of network cameras - home and office.
I could add all office cameras to my home instance and the other way around, but was wondering if there was a better solution as I would be using lots of b/w for pulling images remotely plus I would like to keep these two sets of cameras separate.

Two ideas that crossed my mind:

1. Can zone minder have event triggers which would upload all the event images to a remote site ?

2. Can I run two instances of zoneminder on the same box one for local cameras one for remote ones ?

2 tings that come to mind i plan to do this with my system

1.) Lock the PC to something heavy. or if no money or nothing heavy screw the pc to you desk from the inside.

2.)cheap webcam
3.) zm email to my gmail when that cam is triggered. its built in set up email then set up a filter

Another thing, get a NAS, and place it in the other side of the house, hidden way out of site...

Amusingly, on one of my installations, they've twice taken the camera mounted above the DVR and the one on the office door, yet left the DVR itself. Criminal intelligence apparently varies from location to location.

You can create a filter with the 'upload' box triggered. When you save the filter you can select the option for it to run in the background, which means uploads will occur pretty much when the event happens.

if the last idea doesn;t work for you -
create a script/cronjob that looks for the latest modified folder inside the events folder - that will contain the last recorded images - and store those offsite

Nepenthes wrote:You can create a filter with the 'upload' box triggered. When you save the filter you can select the option for it to run in the background, which means uploads will occur pretty much when the event happens.

...with the caveat that you need to make sure your ZM_FILTER_EXECUTE_INTERVAL settings is low enough. Also, the event has to end before the upload can occur.

(I'm assuming this mechanism hasn't changed since v1.22.3 that I'm using)

Mathew

I'm in about the same situation. Remote house location with no fast way to get there and the computer itself will surely be a target if found.

I've thought of a distributed and live replicated filesystem, something like ZFS. If there is no Internet connection at the moment of the event, the computer will still send me an SMS telling what was triggered, but if Internet is up I'll get at least the videos until the computer was taken.

So, basically, is there another simpler way then setting up ZFS?

I email a few images as soon as the filter is triggered. The script was posted under topic "Email Zoneminder Images..." It's been working good so far, will probably change the number of images emailed after some more experience.

Chuck