What exactly is "archive"?

[anderson110]

1. What does it do?
2. What is the purpose of doing that?

Neither of these seem to be explained in the documentation, and experimenting with the function doesn't make it clear, either.

I usually review my footage each day using zmNinja's excellent "Event Montage" view. Normally there's nothing interesting, so I delete the events so I don't end up reviewing them again.

But suppose I didn't want to really delete them for good, but rather just "move them aside" so that I don't review them again. This is what I would expect an "archive" function to do. So I select them all, hit archive, and now a bunch of things show as "archived", but they still show up in my event list. That seems confusing. Seems to me they should either be in the event list, or they should be archived, but not both.

So I figure, ok, well these things are "archived", so they've been saved somewhere. I'll just delete the events now, and keep the archive. But when I delete the events, the archive is also deleted? Very confusing.

What exactly is archive doing, and how was it expected that it would be used?

[mikb]

I don't think archive, by itself, does anything. It's just a flag.

It marks the event as "archive worthy" or not. It comes in useful when you want to say "delete everything over 7 days old" or "delete stuff to free up space, I'm at 96% disk". But ... you can add "NOT IF MARKED AS ARCHIVED". Then you can put a separate rule for "delete ARCHIVED videos if over 30 days". Or not. Then the archived ones will be kept for ever.

They don't move anywhere, or get saved anywhere else. If you delete an event, it's gone. So use the "archive" flag to guide *whether* it's deleted or not, or *when* it's deleted, or if it's turned into a video for export -- that's what I use it for. If tagged with "archive", a video gets created and exported, and the event persists for 14 days. Otherwise, the event just sits there for a bit, and deleted after 7 days, with no video export. I don't manually delete "seen" events, as a filter does this automatically (Purge When Old).

I manually tag any "interesting" events by hitting "archive" on them.

[anderson110]

Should probably be called "flagged" or "marked" or something then. The "archive" functionality of, say, gmail and many other systems implies that you are moving items out of a working area into some secondary long-term storage.

Thanks for the explanation, though. It would be helpful for there to be a section in the manual saying what you just said.

I guess it's a feature request for something that takes care of the use case "I've reviewed this, I want it out of my queue of unseen things, but not deleted."

[knight-of-ni]

There is. The archive bit is explained here:
http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/sta ... vents.html

[anderson110]

Thanks for the pointer.

This bit is confusing me though:

"Archiving an event means that it is kept to one side and not displayed in the normal event listings unless you specifically ask to view the archived events. This is useful for keeping events that you think may be important or just wish to protect. Once an event is archived it can be deleted or unarchived but you cannot accidentally delete it when viewing normal unarchived events."

Is it me or is the behavior described here not actually how it works? When I archive events, they still show up in my normal event listings.

[mikb]

"When I archive events, they still show up in my normal event listings."

My experience also -- I don't know if that's version-dependent (still lumbering on 1.25 here) or requires a tick box option somewhere that I haven't poked.

I must have specifically asked, by default, or just forgotten

[anderson110]

I'm on 1.30.0. I'm pretty sure I didn't specifically ask.

[alabamatoy]

This hasnt ever made sense to me, either. I assumed that "archive" meant that normal delete action would not touch the event, but it doesnt work that way. Like others said, its just a flag for your own use. I would *prefer* to have the archive flag prevent deletion, period. I would want to unarchive before deletion would become possible.