Milestone VMS Questions

[TXGold 0]

Is it possible to set a schedule for continuous recording?

If not can other business owners chime in that use milestone with motion only? I am not comfortable having to depend on motion only. And settings to sensitive to record more often than not eat up to much storage.

 

I have a 2.5" 64GB SSD© for OS and VMS, 1 TB HDD(D), 2 TB HDD(E), and a new 3TB HDD(not initialized yet)

 

What is the best way to set up my drives? This is a T20 running WHS2011. I was originally thinking that if I run all drives independently and let the software figure out what it wants to do, it would be easiest. However, I believe this software has some features that are not present unless I spend a lot more. For example, continuos record. Any business attorney will tell you to have it run continuos during business hours. Might need to start looking for a different software. Back to my question, how do I set the three 3.5" HDD's up so that the are running best? Not sure what the difference between record vs archive.

 

What setting do I need to make to WHS2011 so that after power failure it reboots and keeps recording?

 

Anybody have an idea how to get my ACTi E96 fisheye to deworp on the milestone smart client? A thread about the camera lead me to camera critic Buellwinkle's website that mentioned that milestone was going to begin offering support back last fall, but I can't find anything, and both companies tell me it is the others plugin needed.

 

Any other suggestion would be appreciated.

 

Warm Regards,

TXGold

[voip-ninja 0]

Is it possible to set a schedule for continuous recording?

If not can other business owners chime in that use milestone with motion only? I am not comfortable having to depend on motion only. And settings to sensitive to record more often than not eat up to much storage.

 

I have a 2.5" 64GB SSD© for OS and VMS, 1 TB HDD(D), 2 TB HDD(E), and a new 3TB HDD(not initialized yet)

 

What is the best way to set up my drives? This is a T20 running WHS2011. I was originally thinking that if I run all drives independently and let the software figure out what it wants to do, it would be easiest. However, I believe this software has some features that are not present unless I spend a lot more. For example, continuos record. Any business attorney will tell you to have it run continuos during business hours. Might need to start looking for a different software. Back to my question, how do I set the three 3.5" HDD's up so that the are running best? Not sure what the difference between record vs archive.

 

What setting do I need to make to WHS2011 so that after power failure it reboots and keeps recording?

 

Anybody have an idea how to get my ACTi E96 fisheye to deworp on the milestone smart client? A thread about the camera lead me to camera critic Buellwinkle's website that mentioned that milestone was going to begin offering support back last fall, but I can't find anything, and both companies tell me it is the others plugin needed.

 

Any other suggestion would be appreciated.

 

Warm Regards,

TXGold

 

Wow... that's a lot of questions.

 

I can't answer all of your questions but I can answer some.

 

WHS 2011 will take your drives, and just like any regular flavor of Windows it will register them as C:\ for the OS drive, then next drive is D:\ then E:\ etc. It has the ability to create "shares" for these drives so that you can reference them by the share name rather than the drive letter when you set up user accounts, etc.

 

You don't need to do any of this.... you can simply create a folder in one of the non system drives and point Milestone to that. So, for example on WHS 2011 I created a "NVR recordings" folder on my 2TB E:\ drive and point Milestone to that folder for the recordings and archives of each of my 4 cameras.

 

As far as continuous recording, well, I don't do it. It chews up a ton of disk space for one thing, and it also beats the crap out of non server class hardware because you are writing and re-writing the disks 24 hours a day, even when nothing is going on. Motion detection in modern cameras is pretty good, and if you do camera side motion detection you can also configure the cams to create a recording or series of image files on local SD storage as a backup in case something happens to the NVR.

 

HOWEVER... if you want to do it, Milestone does do it (at least with essentials and up versions)... just click on "recording" and choose "continuous" instead of motion detection... problem solved.

 

As to your question of recovering from a power failure... well, Milestone starts automatically and you can usually configure the PC in the BIOS options to start automatically after a power failure.

 

However... I think it's a bit foolish not to put a NVR PC on a small UPS to keep it up at least during your typical 5-20 minute power events. You can get a decent 1kVA UPS for $120. It will keep a small PC up for at least 25-35 minutes during a power event. If you simply let the PC die when you have a power failure, there's always the chance that the system partition is corrupted, it won't start back up without doing a disk check (or won't start at all)... not to mention equipment damage when something gets a power strike through it during a brownout or surge. A good UPS prevents nearly all of that and is not expensive.