ZoneMinder Forums

There are times, like on a windy day, where I'll have a bunch of events where nothing happened. I'll have to go through and delete tens or hundreds of events of trees blowing in the wind or of shadows moving. But after I've clicked delete a hundred times, every once in a while, my trigger finger will accidentally delete a real event.

It would be nice if after clicking delete, the event could go into a trash bin. Then there could be an "Empty trash" button on the main ZM page that would actually delete the events.

Thoughts?

i suppose if there was a query that showed db entries with the delete flag then these could be shown. but you would have to beat zm audit, but yes i spose it could work. Out of interest as i never delete events and just leave purge when full to it how many people actually delete manually?

Yes it would be useful, but i guess you delete old events to make place for new ones, a trashbin funktion still need to store the events somewhere, so let the PurgeWhenFull filter do the job of deleting events when needed and adjust size of storage by adding new disks to control how long events are stored.
a solution might be to have a choice to use "soft" and a "hard" delete, where hard removes events immediatly and soft marks events for deletion but isn't executed until a preset timeperiod has passed and PurgeWhenFull need to make some room.

Like James, I let 'em expire. Only ever deleted two events manually, and those were because they caught a relative peering out of the window with no clothes on!

If you're trying to keep events to a minimum for any reason - perhaps tweaking the PurgeWhenFull process will keep the number lower.

Maybe this is one occasion when adjusting ones habits might prove less trouble than forcing the software to do something it wasn't designed to?

i agree but i think a compromise is available without any modification.
Make your zmaudit timer huge so it runs twice a day. Then if you delete too Much by mistake you can edit the db to delete the flag.
We all use zm in a slightly different way and use the options to personalise it to our way. The other way would be to archive all your windy footage then a day or too later delete the archive

I'm in a bit of a dilemma with 3 cameras running.

Here's what I'm doing.

1) Viewing ALL IMAGES, Checking them all, then selecting ARCHIVE.
- I'm not sure where the archive is going, nor do I know the type
of the archive file, is it a .tar somewhere on /var?

2) I'm Exporting after I archive, then I'm downloading them to my PC in a
.tar and I'm not sure if I'm being too redundant about this. Doing this on a daily basis is probably going to really chew up some disk space, but having near-line 400gb storage which should satisfy a years worth of events at approximately 100mb of images or video per day, which incidentally, the video appears to be like MOTION where its a series of images than rather MPEG or AVI format in itself, and that I do not know how to resolve.

3) Is there an AUTO ARCHIVE FEATURE somewhere? I would like to be able to auto-archive every daily event, then PURGE them out and RESET all events to ZERO at MIDNIGHT or specified time DAILY, then either manually take the daily archives from each camera and ftp to NAS or other.

PS: Would be quite slick to see a distro that would run on a KURO box so there isn't a lot of overhead with ZM. I don't have a KURO box, but it would be i've read about that stuff, would be pretty cool too see if it worked..those are merely earlier linkstations..

Thanks for any replies regarding the autoarchive remedies in advance..

Hi dm

1) Viewing ALL IMAGES, Checking them all, then selecting ARCHIVE.
- I'm not sure where the archive is going, nor do I know the type
of the archive file, is it a .tar somewhere on /var?

The Archive function is only a Database key bieng set on the event no packing will be done on it, so no .tar files on a standard archive, but you can make a script that does it for you.

2) I'm Exporting after I archive, then I'm downloading them to my PC in a
.tar and I'm not sure if I'm being too redundant about this. Doing this on a daily basis is probably going to really chew up some disk space, but having near-line 400gb storage which should satisfy a years worth of events at approximately 100mb of images or video per day, which incidentally, the video appears to be like MOTION where its a series of images than rather MPEG or AVI format in itself, and that I do not know how to resolve.

Well there is another way to export your events, and that is by using the ftp upload of events, that can be done to another directory on your server where you then can get them for your pc thru a samba network, so in short you can make a filter to do this for you on all archived events.

3) Is there an AUTO ARCHIVE FEATURE somewhere? I would like to be able to auto-archive every daily event, then PURGE them out and RESET all events to ZERO at MIDNIGHT or specified time DAILY, then either manually take the daily archives from each camera and ftp to NAS or other.

Yes there is an auto archive function in the filter setup, all you need to do is configure it so it fits your needs, and then you can have that filter upload your newly archived events to your ftp server .

So in short most of the things you are asking about can be done thru filters, it is only a question about how you setup your filter.

Thanks for your reply;

"Yes there is an auto archive function in the filter setup, all you need to do is configure it so it fits your needs, and then you can have that filter upload your newly archived events to your ftp server .
"

This 'auto archive function in filter set up does not exist on my mandrake distro of 1.22.2'

The only two things the show up under filters are;


EventDump
PurgeWhenFull

- -

I'm quite confused about the process in 'creating my own filters' -- I have read the documentation section on this, but I don't see any area that allows me to 'Name, or Create' my own filters.

The Documentation does refer to the ability to 'Create a Filter, and a subset to 'ftp' ALL or ARCHIVE.

I'm sorry, Are you saying I have to create scripts? I'm not sure that I'm up for that at this point time-wise, but is your next release going to simplify things with FILTERS, FTP and ARCHIVE b/c I'm seriously lost after looking at this for over an hour or so.

Hi dm

dm wrote:Thanks for your reply;

"Yes there is an auto archive function in the filter setup, all you need to do is configure it so it fits your needs, and then you can have that filter upload your newly archived events to your ftp server .
"

This 'auto archive function in filter set up does not exist on my mandrake distro of 1.22.2'

The only two things the show up under filters are;


EventDump
PurgeWhenFull

- -

I'm quite confused about the process in 'creating my own filters' -- I have read the documentation section on this, but I don't see any area that allows me to 'Name, or Create' my own filters.

The Documentation does refer to the ability to 'Create a Filter, and a subset to 'ftp' ALL or ARCHIVE.

I'm sorry, Are you saying I have to create scripts? I'm not sure that I'm up for that at this point time-wise, but is your next release going to simplify things with FILTERS, FTP and ARCHIVE b/c I'm seriously lost after looking at this for over an hour or so.

Let me try and walk you thru making a filter.

1. After logging in to ZoneMinder click the filter button.
2. On the window that opened click the ShowFilterWindow.
3. In the filter window make a filter that looks like this:


4. Press save link in the top right corner.
5. Then choose the action you want the filter to do, for instance archive the events, or just ftp upload them (The FTP will not be active before you change the ftp configuration in Options/FTP).
6. Name your event and then save it

What this filter should do is run the filter action on all events that are more than 1 day old, and if i remember right you can choose more than one action for the filter, as they will be run in the order they are listet.

voronwe wrote:Hi dm

dm wrote:Thanks for your reply;

"Yes there is an auto archive function in the filter setup, all you need to do is configure it so it fits your needs, and then you can have that filter upload your newly archived events to your ftp server .
"

This 'auto archive function in filter set up does not exist on my mandrake distro of 1.22.2'

The only two things the show up under filters are;


EventDump
PurgeWhenFull

- -

I'm quite confused about the process in 'creating my own filters' -- I have read the documentation section on this, but I don't see any area that allows me to 'Name, or Create' my own filters.

The Documentation does refer to the ability to 'Create a Filter, and a subset to 'ftp' ALL or ARCHIVE.

I'm sorry, Are you saying I have to create scripts? I'm not sure that I'm up for that at this point time-wise, but is your next release going to simplify things with FILTERS, FTP and ARCHIVE b/c I'm seriously lost after looking at this for over an hour or so.

Let me try and walk you thru making a filter.

1. After logging in to ZoneMinder click the filter button.
2. On the window that opened click the ShowFilterWindow.
3. In the filter window make a filter that looks like this:


4. Press save link in the top right corner.
5. Then choose the action you want the filter to do, for instance archive the events, or just ftp upload them (The FTP will not be active before you change the ftp configuration in Options/FTP).
6. Name your event and then save it

What this filter should do is run the filter action on all events that are more than 1 day old, and if i remember right you can choose more than one action for the filter, as they will be run in the order they are listet.

Thanks Tom, This must just be EuroLogic, but makes perfect sense now. What I did yesterday was hook up my Linkstation and then adjusted the FTP Settings in OPTIONS. I was skeptical at first not thinking it would do anything, here's why:

a) When I tried using the FTP command to get to the server, I could not. Mandrake does not accept the command FTP , e.g. ftp x.x.x.x where x= ip.

b) SFTP works, but the Linkstation does not do SSH to my knowledge unless the firmware upgrades are avail for that.

I did finally get that working, and now its wonderful, b/c now I have figured out how to archive all of my events Instantly!

I don't know that I can insert an image here but I'm doing the:

[Archive,Video,Upload,Execute,Delete]

I think I've gotten that correct, it is uploading the tar balls to the ftp server to a directory now where I wish to store the images and videos.

I have to admit, somehow it was a little trickier than I thought, but I just kept reading through the docs and second guessing a few things but finally got things rolling there..

SSH isn't needed on a small LAN, and I had too many problems with Proftpd vs. SSH, SSHD worked better for me, but since storage is an issue I have to just use the LS.

Thank you for your response, I will make not of that and your help is most appreciated.

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Hi dm

Iam just happy that you got it working in a way that you are happy about.

And no problem, we are all here to help in the best way we can.

I had created as a test several USB Cameras attached to a USB HUB, with no positive results so I gave up on that. I got the Black SOD on all of them, I'm sure there may be a way to make them work, but I only need one additional USB CAM going which I cannot seem to get going..

Back to the events at hand.. I created like /dev/video0 - /dev/video5.

The funny thing is, the counters would all reset to zero since I had the filters set to EventDump + Delete, so I removed that filter, reset everything, and it still kept occurring. Stopping and restarting ZM didn't fix the issue. I did have all of the additional USB Cameras set to NONE so I thought nothing should even be recognized by ZM therefore nothing will happen and the events should start counting down once the filter was reset. WRONG.

To solve the issue, I had to REMOVE the Additional USB WEBCAMS out of the ZM interface that were set to NONE and then the event counter started working again..

Hmm...