question about our old dmr

[LA_Bean 0]

Hi everyone new to the forum and happy to have found this site.

We have an old dmr called Advantech ak1004 from what i see labeled behind the box. It looks like it records all the feed into a hard drive but there is no way provide the police or anyone any recordings unless i give them the whole hard drive from the dmr. It can support 4 cams, has a rs232 port and a lan port. Im guessing the lan port is to connect to a router to view the store from home but we have no software for this. Now im not sure what the rs232 port is actually used for. My friend said he can hook up a router for my pc and the dmr to view from home but no software to connect to the dmr. As you can see im not too savy with any of this technology. Now my question is:

1. is there a way i can get software to view my store when at home?

2. is there any device i can get to pull out the recorded info from the dmr to a cd disk or something?

3. should i just invest in a new dmr that has a disk drive already?

any help would be appreciated and thank you.

[v2comp 0]

Advantech DVR’s are actually PC based systems. I have checked manufacturers web site for available software downloads, unfortunately they do not have download for your part number.

I would take the cover off your unit and check the part number and name or anything you can get from the actual capture board. I think they are using third party capture boards anyway. If you get lucky you may find something on the capture board and google around to see if you can find download for this particular board.

Going to your second question, I have installed many, many systems and found that most users are disappointed with the back up from CCTV digital recorders. Because of the shear amount of data video requires, there is no practical and fast way of back up DVR video on regular basis, instead it makes a lots of sense to just focused on absolutely critical data.

Here are my tips:

Only back up video of activity that is of your concern, so it wont be overwritten and lost forever.

Always back up to regular VHS tape using your regular VCR ( yes, the old good VCR ).

You may ask me why would I want to back up using the old VCR technology. The answer is quite simple, if for any reason you will be asked to provide video evidence (police or court) they will ask for the tape. Now if you save the video to your computer or CD-R, you will need to find a way to transfer this to VHS if needed for evidence.

If your DVR works fine, I would stick to it, just get your self a VCR place it on top of it for back up if needed. I honestly think that all these disk drives that come with current DVR’s are just waste of money.

 

I hope this will help.