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I am currently using Zoneminder 1.19.4 and have a question about changning the name of the monitor.

When you change the name of the monitor the application deletes all events that was associated with the old monitor name. Other than moving all the events into the new event folder or archiving all the events is there a way to gracefully save all this data?

Would it cause any problems in the database to simply stop ZM rename the monitor and rename the event folder and then restart ZM? Or would this cause orphans to be created in the database tables?

Is there a setting to tell ZM not to delete the events folders from monitors that are not found?

Space is not an issue as I am pushing all my events to a 2.4TB storage system and need to keep all events associated with a particular monitor for at least six months.

Also, is there a way to automatically prefix events with the camera name or id number?

Lastly, is there a way to setup automatic archiving of events? Say I want all events older than 1 week to automatically be archived. Is there a way to set this up without having to individually archiving each item?

Thanks for all the help
John

Hi John,

You raise several good points here. I'll try and get back and address them in full tomorrow.

Phil,

Right, I've got a bit more time to address these now!

l8nite4me wrote:I am currently using Zoneminder 1.19.4 and have a question about changning the name of the monitor.

When you change the name of the monitor the application deletes all events that was associated with the old monitor name. Other than moving all the events into the new event folder or archiving all the events is there a way to gracefully save all this data?

Would it cause any problems in the database to simply stop ZM rename the monitor and rename the event folder and then restart ZM? Or would this cause orphans to be created in the database tables?

I think this is a bug. Renaming a monitor basically just renames the event directory anyway. All the DB events will be fine as they are associated with the monitor id and not the name. I supect that the problem lies with zmaudit which is probably not aware of the name change and finds an empty folder (as it's been moved) but events in the DB and as it thinks the events have no images goes and deletes them. So a simple workaround _should_ be to stop ZM before doing the rename (still from the web interface). However this problem and a couple of other issues with monitor names persuades me that the monitor path should use the id and not the name. This would avoid your problem and other with bogus characters in URLs.

l8nite4me wrote:Is there a setting to tell ZM not to delete the events folders from monitors that are not found?

Space is not an issue as I am pushing all my events to a 2.4TB storage system and need to keep all events associated with a particular monitor for at least six months.

I think this would be addressed by my initial comment. Or failing that making sure zmaudit didn't run.

l8nite4me wrote:Also, is there a way to automatically prefix events with the camera name or id number?

I assume you mean the event names? No there currently isn't a facility for this, however it sounds like a good idea so I'll add it!

l8nite4me wrote:Lastly, is there a way to setup automatic archiving of events? Say I want all events older than 1 week to automatically be archived. Is there a way to set this up without having to individually archiving each item?

Yes, you can set up a filter to select the events you (e.g. older than one week) and then when you save it you will have the option to automatically archive matching events.

l8nite4me wrote:Thanks for all the help
John

No problem!

Phil,

Thanks Phil, I have put everything into action that you described and all seems to be working perfectly.

Again Great Product.

John