askantik

Hello all, I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this issue for me. I have a CIB K808AV DVR. It's a very low-budget unit that I'm using for research to monitor wild animals (I'm a grad student, hence the low budget). It has been stable, running 3 months and recording with no problems. Trouble is, I think most people use one of these and only ever 'backup' or download a day or so of video (e.g., to see what happened on a certain date). I, on the other hand, need to download ALL of the data. Unfortunately, the built-in software only allows the user to download one calendar day's worth of video at a time. I have something like 90-100 days worth of video (not 24 hours per day) and it takes 30+ minutes to download one day at a time. I've contacted CIB and they told me there was no other way to do this and they were no help at all (surprise, surprise). I've resorted to desparate measures-- I took the hard drive from the DVR out and cloned it to an external USB drive. Trouble is, I can't access the files in either Windows or Linux. It appears that the DVR uses some kind of weird or propietary file system. I'm at my wit's end here. I had no idea it would be so much trouble to download all the data, but I need this data for my thesis. Meanwhile, I can't record new video because the drive is full but I don't want it to overwrite the existing recordings until I know I have an accessible copy... Does anyone have any suggestions for 1) how to access the data on the cloned drive with the 'weird' file system, or 2) how to make the DVR back up all data without me having to wait 30 minutes for download, click a button, wait 30 minutes, click a button, etc.? I will give my firstborn child to anyone who can help me with this... Edit: If I connect the DVR's drive directly to a PC, I see a 4.1GB partition (e.g., not the whole drive). The 4.1GB partition has a folder for every day's worth of video. Inside the folder is a file with the channel # and the time it recorded, but the files have a .nvr extension and are only about 100kb each. Can I do anything with these?

Hey Jason, I ended up buying an additional DVR. The DVR I have would fit a larger drive, but it was not any cheaper than just buying another DVR. The new one I bought is a Zmodo which I think will let me backup all data at once. And I can watch the videos on the CIB one directly since I'll have a second DVR making recordings now. Not the solution I wanted, but I could never get anywhere on pulling the data off the drive.

Thanks, I'll give this a try.

-If I insert a new drive, will that work? If so, I'm assuming the DVR's "operating system" is not stored on the hard drive? -I can access the DVR via a web browser, but I have the same limitation-- only one day at at time. -Well, I know for future reference. I don't have much experience with CCTV systems, but I just assumed any system would have a "download all" function.