Clips from Yesterday Disappear.

[sgrob]

I have the Pro edition and it is installed on a dedicated Intel NUC D34010WYK running Windows 10 with a 120GB hard drive and 8GB RAM. I have two Axis P1425LE cameras configured along with an Axis 225FD and a Panasonic BL-C30A. The NUC and all 4 cameras are on my home network. The first time I installed Sighthound on the NUC, every thing ran fine. I had the storage set to 50GB, the Temporary Video to 48 hours and I could see several days history. Then I began experimenting with storing clips on OneDrive and Dropbox by changing the rules to point to the appropriate folder path on the NUC for OneDrive or Dropbox. These tests were successful but when I tried to revert the path back to the default I lost all the "history" clips every day. To put everything back to default, I uninstalled Sighthound, deleted all of it's directories and then re-installed Sighthound. After the re-install, I could see the previous days clips as long as I viewed them early in the morning but around 10am or so, they would all disappear for all 4 cameras. Next, I re-installed Windows 10 and deleted all partitions on the hard drive before starting so no files from the previous install could be used during the re-install. Unfortunately, the symptom persists - in the early morning, I can see clips from the previous day but around midmorning they all disappear. Can you please give me instructions on how to go back to the default settings so I can store clips on the internal hard drive and I can once again see several days of clips.
Thanks for your time.
-Steve

[Semper Vaporo]

Does the drive actually have 50GB available? It is possible that it is deleting relatively recent files because there just simply is not room to keep them as new files are created.

[sgrob]

Yes, it appears that Sighthound divided up its 50GB between the 4 cameras and allocated a total of 50GB. The hard drive still shows 20GB free at this point. This all worked very nicely for about a month before I started playing with Onedrive and Dropbox.

Steve

[Semper Vaporo]

Yes, it seems that SightHound allocates storage for all cameras in the quota that you set, not for each individual camera.

I am wondering if maybe OneDrive and DropBox are using too much disk space for temporary storage for files to be eventually uploaded to the cloud/internet/whatever and it is possible that the free space disappears temporarily during the day as files are prepped to upload and that is using up the 20GB that you show as available now and thus encroaching upon the 50GB you told SightHound it could use... I don't think SightHound claims exclusive rights to the space you allocate, it just won't use more than that in its operations and if the disk does not have that much space available then SightHound will only use what is available... i.e.: other processes can use any space that is available at the moment and Sighthound gets what is left, but not more than what you specified. You could allocate more than the total size of the drive and SightHound would not care, it would just use all it can, and then delete old files as necessary to fit new in, but other processes would start to have problems when they try to store something and there is no room because SightHound is using it all.

[sgrob]

Eliminating the disk space use by Onedrive and Dropbox is why I wiped the hard drive clean before reinstalling Windows 10 and Sighthound. After the reinstall I did not install Onedrive or Dropbox. There is nothing running on the NUC other than Sighthound as I wanted as much of the resources available for Sighthound to use as possible. Like you, I also thought there just was not enough storage for Sighthound to store more that a days worth of clips. But there is no way my 4 cameras produce 50GB of clips just watching my yard. And before I started playing with Onedrive and Dropbox Sighthound stored 2 or 3 days of clips. It's almost like some parameters were stored on my Sighthound online account that gets downloaded during the install and now it regulates clip retention. It's like clockwork - I can see the previous days clips (no matter how many or how little there are) until late morning and then in the afternoon a search on any of the 4 cameras for the previous day shows "0 results". This has been going on every day since the reinstall about a week ago.

Semper Vaporo - I really appreciate all your comments. I think you and I are thinking alike as far as the disk space usage goes. I checked the hard drive again this morning and it still shows 20GB freespace. A few days ago, I bumped up the "Use no more than" setting up to 60GB from 50GB . My thinking was that I should begin to see more than one day of clips then. Unfortunately, nothing changed and all the previous days clips disappeared before noon as usual. So, I put it back to 50GB again.

Any ideas on what to try next?

[Devin]

Hi Steve,

It sounds like the temporary footage from all four of your cameras is taking up more than 50GB of space before reaching the 48 hour mark. To clarify - temporary video is ALL video coming in, regardless of whether motion is detected or not. Temporary video is given priority over saved clips that match your rules.

In general, it is more efficient to allocate less space to temporary video, which frees up more space for saved clips. That’s because if your rules accurately capture events of interest, nothing particularly important is happening in the rest of the temporary video. For example, if you average one hour of saved clips per day, then reducing the amount of temporary video by one day can give you three more weeks of saved clips (and vice versa).

For more details on how long video is saved, how to manage disk space, and how video clips are divided up, please see https://www.sighthound.com/support/managing-your-video

Regards,

-Devin

[sgrob]

Devin,
Thank you for your comments. I did read the article on how to manage videos and actually reduced the "Temporarily keep all video for up to" parameter from the default 48 hours to only 36 hours for all 4 cameras. I let it sit for a couple of days in hopes that I might see at least 2 days of clips. Unfortunately, nothing has changed and I can see yesterdays clips for all 4 cameras in the morning but they all disappear just before noon. As a side note, I have all cameras "For clips and temporary video, use up to:" parameter set to 50GB which is less than half of the 120GB hard drive and File Explorer currently shows 31.8GB available on the hard drive. My plan is to reduce this parameter down to 40GB to see if it makes any difference. At this point I don't have much confidence.

Steve

[Semper Vaporo]

Are you thinking that the 50GB is for each camera or for all of them together... same for the time limit...those are both for all cameras in total. Just one of my cameras takes around 37GB per day! Depending on the resolution of your cameras they could be using over 50GB per day in total.

[sgrob]

Update: While looking at the clips from the Axis 225FD through the Sighthound client on my laptop, I noticed that the client often timed out trying to load the clips from that particular camera. Thinking that the clips from this camera may have been too numerous or to large, I disabled the camera. After examining the clips, I found several huge clips. For example, one was 3.4 hours long and another a whopping 7 hours long. After deleting these huge clips, the history began to fill in and I am now up to 7 days of history and counting! It appeared that the "snow" that is present when the Axis 225FD is in IR mode at night produces enough changing pixels that Sighthound thinks there is motion and creates a clip. Creating a rule with a "door region for objects entering or leaving" for this camera seems to have helped and I haven't seen a clip over 30 seconds in a week. And the history is still building.