ZoneMinder Forums

I would like to remove old events automatically. To start with, events older than maybe 12 hours will be deleted just for testing. So far my efforts have failed. I have searched the forum for the answer only to find some ambiguous replies. For example:

"If you want to delete all event over x days old then create a filter and use -21 days as the condition."

This does not provide the "Monitor Name". I have tried "Time" for the Monitor Name, "greater than or equal to" for the relational operator and "12 hours" for the value. What is the correct way?

Regards,
David Koski
dkoski@sutinen.com

Click on Filters button...

set like...

Archive Status equal to Unarchive Only +
and Time less than -12 hours + (if you want to delete certain monitors)
and Monitor Name equal to MonitorName

Sort by Date/Time desc Limit to first 5 results only


Click on submit and see if anything shows up... if yes, check if that's what you want... if yes... then click on Delete all matches and save... stick a name, like DeleteOldEvents and click on execute on background

Thank you. I'll give it a try. By the way, is "less than" "-12 hours" the same as "greater than or equal to" "12 hours"?

Regards,
David Koski
dkoski@sutine.com

set like...

Archive Status equal to Unarchive Only +
and Time less than -12 hours + (if you want to delete certain monitors)
and Monitor Name equal to MonitorName

Sort by Date/Time desc Limit to first 5 results only

I set to this:
Archive Status equal to "Unarchived Only"
and Time less than -16 hours
Sort by Date/Time Desc

Now it keeps deleting the most recent events instead of the oldest.

Regards,
David Koski
dkoski@sutinen.com

Change Desc to Asc

Now it deletes all my events. Here are my settings:



Regards,
David Koski
dkoski@sutinen.com

I told you not to tick the Delete all matches, until you knew it was working...

I have it like

Archive Status equal to Unarchive only +
and Date Less than -60 days
sort by Date/time Desc Limit to first 5 results only

and it works for me...

Why descending? Am I lacking in caffeine today? Both of my servers are set to ascending, and behave as I'd expect them to, deleting the older stuff first.

Ascending:
12/1/2009
12/2/2009
12/3/2009

Descending:
12/3/2009
12/2/2009
12/1/2009

I don't care if I loose events when testing. By the way, how do I know if it is working unless it deletes them?



Anyway, the configuration dialog doesn't seem to make sense to me. If you delete based on age, why does it matter which way they are sorted? I'm probably missing something simple.



Thanks!

David Koski

dkoski@sutinen.com

Why Desc??? I do not know... I was having trouble getting it to work... and as it is, it does work, so why change it???

How do you know if it works??? well you untick the delete box, and hit on the Submit button, it will open a new window with a list if it works, if it doesn't it will show you poo!!! then you tweak again and again!!!

Well, if you flat out want to delete anything older than 60 days or whichever, then I guess it doesn't really matter. Personally, and I imagine for most of us, we'd rather it do circular recording, as in deleting the oldest images while writing the newest images.

If you sort descending and tell it to delete the first 5, you're telling it to delete the newest 5 images that match your criteria. If you sort ascending and tell it to delete 5, you're telling it to delete the oldest 5.

Also, I'd imagine most (chime in if I'm wrong) of us use disk percentage instead of an arbitrary amount of days, which is scalable whether you add cameras, increase frame rates, etc. If you just go by # days, unless you have infinite storage, you'll eventually run into 100% disk space usage, which is bit of a pain to fix.

If you don't think scaling is important, one of my boxes originally had 6 cameras, currently has 29, and is in the process of getting more. My other box originally had 5 and is about to have 10.