How much do you value backups of home CCTV feeds?

[jasauders 0]

You folks with your CCTV systems, particularly home users, what kind of HDD setup do you guys have? Are you saving to a singular drive? Are your feeds backed up elsewhere?

 

Being an IT guy, I feel exceptionally disconnected from how regular DVR/NVR systems work since my nature is to work with servers and IP based cameras. Do your typical DVR/NVR systems just have one hard drive? Do you folks typically rely on them, or do you find it necessary to synchronize all of the data in some sort of a RAID array or perhaps onto an entirely different box for added backups?

[yakky 0]

Some DVRs allow you to upload motion based events via FTP, that is my approach combined with a monitored alarm system all boxed up somewhere that would make it very difficult to break in, get to and smash or steal all the equipment.

[jasauders 0]

I'm trying to balance the importance of different files. I do 24/7 recording, which is nice because there are things that motion detection just struggles with picking up. I'm either not able to catch the cat on my deck or else I'm picking up events from every little finch that flies by. It's just hard to get a balance between false positives vs not sensitive enough. Not to mention, 24/7 recording uses substantially less processing power, which is super nice for somebody like me who runs an Atom based nettop as their server like I do.

 

My setup is with the above mentioned nettop running Ubuntu Server 12.04.1. It runs various services, such as Subsonic music streaming, Samba file services, etc. Since my cameras support recording-to-NAS (via Samba), it makes things significantly nicer for me because I don't necessarily need an NVR/DVR as I can utilize my existing server which sips energy to begin with.

 

The only crossroad I run into is the hard drive space, which comes with the territory of any 24/7 recording setup. I have three 500GB drives... one internal 2.5", and two external 3.5". Currently my feeds are saving to external A and rsync to external B once a night, which takes about 45 minutes. Since I have a lot of pictures and documents I want to back up, and because I'm not sure I value the home CCTV feeds are needing 24/7/365/absolutely-no-questions 110% uptime, I'm halfway thinking about moving the feeds to the internal 500 and not backing them up anywhere... then just utilize the two external drives for pictures, documents, etc.

 

That would give the two cameras a full 500GB of room, allowing me to save upwards of 8-9 days of 24/7 feeds (whereas now I only save 3 because external A 500GB is pretty full of other things that need backed up). The only downside is... if the internal drive tanks, then I lose whatever feeds I have. However, even if I kept them synchronizing, if external A dies before it syncs to B then I just lost that days feeds anyway. Perhaps it's less of an issue than I originally realized? Perhaps surveillance on the internal 500 and other data on the external 500 with external B being a direct nightly backup will be the way to go?

 

Anyway, I was just curious what you folks did. Thanks for the insight and/or listening.

[shockwave199 0]

At 24/7, how many fps are you recording? Obviously 1-3 fps would increase recording time. The dvr we use at work- an openeye- has a feature called intensive recording, whereby you record 24/7 at a chosen low fps and upon motion, it'll record at a higher chosen fps. My q-see at home, you just schedule, choose fps [and other quality settings] and there you have it. And I just rely on the internal hard drive to record. I don't do redundant backups. However in my audio life, I don't consider critical recordings are safe unless backed up to three different places. But for my cctv setup, the internal HD does the work and keeps the work, with no further consideration.

[ssnapier 0]

I have been thinking SSD would solve this problem, of course to buy one that would even come close to adequate would dang near bankrupt me!

[Kawboy12R 0]

I'm fine with no backups of my recorded video. What're the odds of a failure between the time something happens and I notice it? When I notice something it gets copied (video and snapshots) to computer and thumbdrive. I'd like something better done automatically offsite just in case someone broke in and stole the dvr while they were at it. In-camera sdcard backup is nice though.

[jasauders 0]

At 24/7, how many fps are you recording? Obviously 1-3 fps would increase recording time. The dvr we use at work- an openeye- has a feature called intensive recording, whereby you record 24/7 at a chosen low fps and upon motion, it'll record at a higher chosen fps. My q-see at home, you just schedule, choose fps [and other quality settings] and there you have it. And I just rely on the internal hard drive to record. I don't do redundant backups. However in my audio life, I don't consider critical recordings are safe unless backed up to three different places. But for my cctv setup, the internal HD does the work and keeps the work, with no further consideration.

 

Currently I'm recording at 20 FPS @ 1280x800, mostly because I wanted to see exactly how many days I could get out of a higher FPS setup with my existing HDD space, mostly based out of curiosity. I really wanted to retain higher FPS feeds since with my H264 cams they seem so fluid. I used to think lower FPS levels were just bad quality, but I think that largely came out of MJPG feeds. Most of the cameras I've used that were MJPG based (which is more than 1, but not exactly dozens upon dozens) seem to be a bit more inconsistent, because there are times where the feed feels like it's more like 8 FPS one second and .5 FPS the next second. Things with MPEG4 and H264 just seem much more consistent even at a lower FPS level. Having that high of quality feeds is super nice, but it definitely takes a toll on HDD usage. For fun when I get home I may downclock it to 5 FPS or something to compare. My train of thought was if I can get at least 3 days of recordings out of it, I'd be happy. If anything is missing or damaged I should absolutely notice it at my own house within 3 days, so that's what I went with. Using bash scripts with the "find" command along with cron'ing the job at midnight it keeps the feeds automatically rotating in a "out with the old in with the new" fashion.

 

I've heard of a feature like that open eye before. It definitely sounds interesting, but I'm sure it's still taxing on the CPU to some degree because the CPU would have to be doing continual calculations to determine motion vs no motion. That's one thing I do like about the 24/7 recording since it requires so little processing power since it's one continual flow, which has its benefits when you're trying to use as little electricity as possible by utilizing a low powered Atom based server. I used to consider getting a DVR/NVR until I realized I could just get a fat HDD and continue 24/7 feeds for a fraction of the cost of a DVR/NVR (which often doesn't come with a HDD to begin with...).

 

SSDs are pretty solid, I must say. While I'm not sure I'd trust my life to an SSD with critical data, there's something to be said about their reliability (so far) versus HDDs. That said, if I'm hurting on dishing out money on a 3TB HDD, you can bet how badly I'm hurting on the thought of purchasing a 500GB SSD.

 

It is re-assuring that you guys share a similar outlook on this. I'm currently moving my feeds over to the internal 2.5" HDD, which is where the feeds will be housed from here on out. That should allow a bit more breathing room with backing up my more important data on the external drives.

[yakky 0]

I'm trying to balance the importance of different files. I do 24/7 recording, which is nice because there are things that motion detection just struggles with picking up. I'm either not able to catch the cat on my deck or else I'm picking up events from every little finch that flies by. It's just hard to get a balance between false positives vs not sensitive enough. Not to mention, 24/7 recording uses substantially less processing power, which is super nice for somebody like me who runs an Atom based nettop as their server like I do.

 

What are you using for motion detection? Your symptoms remind me of my first recording CCTV system a few years back, Zoneminder. While it was flexible, the motion detection sucked monkey balls. I could never find a good balance. The current Dahua box I have is nothing short of amazing. It actually picks up a black cat walking in very dark condtions. I'm constantly amazed by the little "real" stuff it is able to capture. Even my blinking Christmas lights didn't seem to trigger it. The only false positives I can't seem to work out a bushes swaying form the wind.

[jasauders 0]

I'm trying to balance the importance of different files. I do 24/7 recording, which is nice because there are things that motion detection just struggles with picking up. I'm either not able to catch the cat on my deck or else I'm picking up events from every little finch that flies by. It's just hard to get a balance between false positives vs not sensitive enough. Not to mention, 24/7 recording uses substantially less processing power, which is super nice for somebody like me who runs an Atom based nettop as their server like I do.

 

What are you using for motion detection? Your symptoms remind me of my first recording CCTV system a few years back, Zoneminder. While it was flexible, the motion detection sucked monkey balls. I could never find a good balance. The current Dahua box I have is nothing short of amazing. It actually picks up a black cat walking in very dark condtions. I'm constantly amazed by the little "real" stuff it is able to capture. Even my blinking Christmas lights didn't seem to trigger it. The only false positives I can't seem to work out a bushes swaying form the wind.

 

I've used ZoneMinder in the past, but there's no way a ZM system would run on an Atom box... ZM itself requires some decent horsepower to run. I've spent most of my time using Motion, which seems far more stable than ZoneMinder. Motion runs as a daemon, which comes with a few pros and cons. It has no GUI, but it's disturbingly stable (haven't had a single hiccup in over a year), and runs as a daemon so it's super light weight. My problem isn't anything that can be solved by any specific motion detection gear unless I get some sort of heat sensors to detect actual people/animals instead of random objects. The wind blows leaves, motion. The cat walks by, motion. The branch casts a shadow on the driveway, and then the wind blows, motion. So many things beyond the control of a motion detection system is where I get false positives. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have too many feeds than not enough. But considering the magnitude of false positives that I got, recording 24/7 wasn't too much further off of the radar, hence why I gave it a shot.

 

Here's what I resorted to doing. I run Motion on my nettop @ 1 FPS utilizing the "center" feature with a 10 second gap... Roughly translated, if you run by my camera for 7 seconds, it'll process 7 jpg's but only save jpg number 4 (center). This way I get minimal snapshots. This allows me to quickly identify based on a handful of snapshots if there's any reason for reviewing the actual feeds. Of course the majority of the time it's just a cat walking by or a bird or the sun or wind blowing leaves or whatever, but it's super nice knowing I have the full time feeds recording too. I don't know, just running Motion @ 1 FPS + full time recording just results in an all-but idle server, even though I'm effectively recording two streams @ 20 FPS each. I certainly have no complaints. I have my snapshots for quick review, I have my video feeds for a mucher smoother video based "whenever-I-want review", and it's all running on a watt sipping box double-sided-taped to my home made patch panel on the wall.

[yakky 0]

Yeah, motion is ok for stuff, I use it at work with a webcam. And FWIW, I ran ZM and 4 camera on a dual core Atom 330. ZMA and ZMC seemed to chew up about a 1/2 a cpu per camera, but it still chugged away. I really am so happy I moved away from that stuff though, having a real DVR is much less work and the results are much better. Only thing i miss was being able to use any browser for access, but now that I have Dahua and Rory's stuff running in wine, its all good.

[jasauders 0]

Yeah, motion is ok for stuff, I use it at work with a webcam. And FWIW, I ran ZM and 4 camera on a dual core Atom 330. ZMA and ZMC seemed to chew up about a 1/2 a cpu per camera, but it still chugged away. I really am so happy I moved away from that stuff though, having a real DVR is much less work and the results are much better. Only thing i miss was being able to use any browser for access, but now that I have Dahua and Rory's stuff running in wine, its all good.

 

What for cameras were you running when you had ZM set up? I was doing 1280x800 @ 10 FPS (two of them) and it was pushing my quad core box pretty hard. I was able to run Motion with ease on a Raspberry Pi... something that I wouldn't even bother attempting with ZM, despite it sounding like it can operate on an Atom. My bigger issue with ZM was the fact that my cameras would just stop working and syslog would be littered with hundreds of lines of jibberish, which didn't really churn up any ideas via ZM forums, Google, etc. The only real suggestion was to increase the shared memory, which I did several times, but it changed nothing.

 

That's when I switched to Motion, which despite the fact it's MJPG only and has no real GUI frontend, it's completely rock solid with reliability. It's so stable I just flat out don't even give it a second thought. I still frequent the ZM IRC channel though. There's a few guys in there who are discussing forking the code, simply because the main dev has been MIA for quite a long time. It sounds like ZM is far from dead, but also not quite fully resurrected yet. The only thing I really miss from ZM to Motion is having a montage layout of all of the cameras, but if you're not afraid of a little HTML/CSS coding you can slap together your own personal HTML page pulling in the MJPG streams relatively easily. I actually posted this on the Motion FAQ... My cams support multiple streams (4 total), so they're saving to the file server with H264 @ 20 FPS on one stream, meanwhile another stream is running MJPG @ 1 FPS... which is what the home made web page utilizes as well as Motion. That way I can pull up that web page on my 2nd monitor and keep an eye on things while I'm doing work on the main monitor.

 

I know that dedicated DVR systems certainly have their benefits. In my case I already had a server running all the time, so having a second box running was kind of meh to me. For quite a while I was shopping around for DVR's and came within a single click of ordering a Dahua, but without a guarantee on whether or not my cameras would work with it, coupled with the no return policy, I bailed on that one pretty quick. Plus, with me being the nerd I am, I have my server configs backing up nightly. So if my server self destructs, I can simply dump the config files (which aren't even 1 MB if I recall) onto the new Linux box and be back and running in no time. Different strokes.

[yakky 0]

Yeah, motion is ok for stuff, I use it at work with a webcam. And FWIW, I ran ZM and 4 camera on a dual core Atom 330. ZMA and ZMC seemed to chew up about a 1/2 a cpu per camera, but it still chugged away. I really am so happy I moved away from that stuff though, having a real DVR is much less work and the results are much better. Only thing i miss was being able to use any browser for access, but now that I have Dahua and Rory's stuff running in wine, its all good.

 

What for cameras were you running when you had ZM set up? I was doing 1280x800 @ 10 FPS (two of them) and it was pushing my quad core box pretty hard. I was able to run Motion with ease on a Raspberry Pi... something that I wouldn't even bother attempting with ZM, despite it sounding like it can operate on an Atom. My bigger issue with ZM was the fact that my cameras would just stop working and syslog would be littered with hundreds of lines of jibberish, which didn't really churn up any ideas via ZM forums, Google, etc. The only real suggestion was to increase the shared memory, which I did several times, but it changed nothing.

 

That's when I switched to Motion, which despite the fact it's MJPG only and has no real GUI frontend, it's completely rock solid with reliability. It's so stable I just flat out don't even give it a second thought. I still frequent the ZM IRC channel though. There's a few guys in there who are discussing forking the code, simply because the main dev has been MIA for quite a long time. It sounds like ZM is far from dead, but also not quite fully resurrected yet. The only thing I really miss from ZM to Motion is having a montage layout of all of the cameras, but if you're not afraid of a little HTML/CSS coding you can slap together your own personal HTML page pulling in the MJPG streams relatively easily. I actually posted this on the Motion FAQ... My cams support multiple streams (4 total), so they're saving to the file server with H264 @ 20 FPS on one stream, meanwhile another stream is running MJPG @ 1 FPS... which is what the home made web page utilizes as well as Motion. That way I can pull up that web page on my 2nd monitor and keep an eye on things while I'm doing work on the main monitor.

 

I know that dedicated DVR systems certainly have their benefits. In my case I already had a server running all the time, so having a second box running was kind of meh to me. For quite a while I was shopping around for DVR's and came within a single click of ordering a Dahua, but without a guarantee on whether or not my cameras would work with it, coupled with the no return policy, I bailed on that one pretty quick. Plus, with me being the nerd I am, I have my server configs backing up nightly. So if my server self destructs, I can simply dump the config files (which aren't even 1 MB if I recall) onto the new Linux box and be back and running in no time. Different strokes.

 

I was running 2 Panasonic 640x480s and a pair of Foscams at 640x480, best I could do was 10fps per cam without bogging the box down.

 

I hear you on the having a server, being able to tweak, etc, that's why I went with ZM. I hit a fork in the road where I needed more cameras with decent night vision, bought a TFT based Night Owl, was very disappointed with some aspects, but it too had amazing motion detection. No SDK and an interface that stunk had me to more research and I ended up with a Dahua.

 

I too wanted a consolidated web page view but Rory Knowles makes a nice app called dhsview that does a 9 camera mosaic view, loads super fast and actually works better than a web page.