ZoneMinder Forums

I have a mess of various old ZM virtual machines. All of them are running on Ubuntu 18.04-LTS. I have no clue why but I can't upgrade the Ubuntu VM's from from Ubuntu 18.04-LTS to Ubuntu 20, 22 or 24-LTS versions. For some reason they all fail (the zoneminder part of the VM) after the dist. upgrade. (thank god for esxi snapshots)...

Is it possible to do a new bare-metal ZM install and import old events and databases? I'm sure it is possible --is there a tutorial or is it easy? Or should I start fresh and keep lugging around these 4x old ZM multi-terabyte virtual machines?

Also, can the current version of ZM run on something like a 32gb (RAM/Memory) Orange Pi 5+? Does current ZM see and make use of the ASIC chips "neural accelerators" that all these little SBC's are putting on raspberry pi-type SBC boards? Are any of those features integrated into ZM or are they all add-on packages? Are they docker containers that run in parallel to ZM?

Has the GUI changed much in new versions since ~2018-2019 ZM? Has the Home Assistant GUI changed any?

EDIT: Is or has writing events and databases to network drives gotten any better? Can I embiggen and attach an older network drive to a new ZM install and will it recognize the old events and keep chugging along as if it just got a new OS and bigger storage --but same database and events?

standard database backup and restore practices should work fine.

No we don't really support any of the new fangled asics... coral tpu can be used for ai that's all separate.

If you would like to play with current ZM, you can go to https://demo.zoneminder.com

Is there somewhere an 'officially sanctioned' step by step guide to such "standard database backup and restore practices" as they apply to zoneminder? My system seems to have become corrupted somehow. It used to work fine, but it's started to do all manner of strange things. I need to do some re-building/repairing. I don't care a bit about saving past events or videos, I just don't want to have to re-enter my entire configuration manually.

You may have already found it, but look at

https://wiki.zoneminder.com/MySQL

I can vouch that backing up the full zm database works when making major changes to your setup. In my case it was to swap hardware, which included a change of drive mount for the dedicated storage and network cards that present differently. Those two were easily dealt with via changes to Netplan and fstab, but the database was a bit more involved
Some of this was due to my wanting to move from Mysql to Mariadb, which I find easier to work with. So everything had to come off the box Zoneminder/DB wise. All was going well until I tried to restore the backup zm database, when it was failing with collation errors of utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci, which turns out to be the difference between Mysql and utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci that Mariadb uses. Using nano a search and replace was the recommended route and the restore completed after that with no errors
Then once restored, Zoneminder was having issues with "The user specified as a definer ('debian-sys-maint'@'localhost') does not exist". Turns out it is just the debian-sys-maint is supposed to be zmuser, so edit the backup again with nano to replace all those entries. A final restore of the database and Zoneminder was back running with all it's previous 40K events accessible
I must say it was an interesting journey and I did wonder if I might end up flattening it all, but these are challenges others have overcome and with a bit of internet searching so did I. The actual backup and restore of the Zoneminder database went as smoothly as Icon suggested, but thought I would add my experience here if anyone else treads this path

The reason for the hardware change was to achieve a 50% power consumption reduction. Moving from a 15 year old HP Z400 to a 10 year old Lenovo P300 has done just that and it still supports the original 8 IP cameras on Mocord. Also moving from a number of BNC cameras and an encoder to extra IP cameras has also saved power which will eventually repay the outlay along with better quality results