Few listed files but huge number of stored files.

[habari]

Yesterday I re-cloned my SSD, intentionally deleting my Sighthound stored videos. I was surprised to find that my folder rapidly repopulated itself. In looking at the folder, I have a continuous stream of movies each about 120+ mb in size. These are not listed by Sighthound in the "camera: Look for: all objects" menu. I attach a screenshot. Why would SH start continuously recording, and even if it is doing that, not list the recordings in the "camera: lookfor: allobjects" menu? This is a huge amount of activity and is not friendly to my SSD.

On another track, I had previously tried to use an attached USB drive as my storage, but SH would not recognize the drive as it would check before the drive was mounted. Does this now work, or does SH still not delay long enough on restart to allow an attached drive to boot up and be recognized by OS X and then SH?

Thanks.

[Semper Vaporo]

"ALL" video is continuously recorded. ALL OF IT! It is broken into 2 minute segments and those are the file names you see in the folder.

When the space allotted for the video is full, then the oldest videos/files are deleted to make room for new videos/files. With one exception...

There is a "database" that contains pointers to the beginning and end of any of the video that matches a rule you have set. When the space is used up, the files are split up to create just one contiguous video of that event from beginning to end and the left-overs on the ends are deleted, so that small segment remains for later review by the user and space is freed for new video.

There is one other consideration... you get to set how long to keep video that does not match a rule. You can set it to as little as 1 hour or longer as you wish. Of course if you set it to a large enough value then the "space limitation" takes precedence. If the time limit is reached then the same process is used to split up the raw video files to produce the rule based segment. Note that it does not seem to delete the raw video immediately after the time limit is reached, but does it as needed; so there might be files older than the time limit you specify, but there is no guarantee it will be there longer than what you specify.

At some point, even the rule saved segments will need to be deleted, but at least they will be the oldest and you have some number of days/weeks/? to review the video and save it elsewhere if you wish to keep it longer.

But the gist of it is that the folders will fill up with 2 minute segments of raw video until the allotted space is filled or the time limit is exceeded.

Unless you are prepared for the problems it can cause, it is recommended that you do not mess with the raw files themselves. SightHound does do a good job of recovering from humans messing with the content of the raw video folders (I am one of those nerds that can't keep my hands off the raw data and I have seen SightHound handle my meddlin' gracefully), but there really is no need for us non-computers to even look at the folders... SightHound will maintain the content.

[habari]

Wow, that seems like an awful lot of activity. Will this lead to faster solid-state drive degradation?

In that regard, the second part of my post inquired about using an external hard drive. I had not been able to successfully do this yet due to sighthound not finding it soon enough. Has that problem been fixed?

[Semper Vaporo]

I started using an SSD just a month or so ago, so I don't know how well it will stand up to this type of usage. I have tried to do some mental gymnastics to determine what kind of life to expect from it (and it gives me a headache!). In an SSD each data storage location has a limited number of times it can be altered. I think the last time I read about how many that is, it was in the hundreds of thousands of times. Just to bend my brainbox some more... assume 500 GB have been allocated, assume each video is 200 MB, and that is 2 minutes of data. In that 500 GB you can store 2500 files or 5000 minutes of video, i.e. 208 hours or 3.47 days of video before something has to be deleted and overwritten. If you can re-write any one point in the storage space 100,000 times, then that is 347,000 days or 951 years. Maybe my calculations are all wet, but that doesn't seem to be a problem!
If you were to put the database on that same SSD, then the number of writes to that data is considerably more per day and that will shorten the life much more... of course the drives themselves use some sort of algorithm to distribute updating a file to force the file to be moved around to lessen the chance of any one spot in the storage space from being pounded upon too much, so even that is not going to damage the drive all that much.
All I have on the SSD at this point is the "Archive" folder with the database still on the HDD... I am still experimenting with this aspect (and experiments in this realm take a long time before I can draw any conclusions!). I have had a couple of problems, but I am not sure yet if it is associated with the SSD or if it is the crippled version of Windows 10 I am using... I deliberately crippled the OS because I want to devote more of the computer to the surveillance work, so I killed many processes in Windows 10 that I didn't think were important... my system is not on the "internet" (I am using version 2.x.x of SightHound because it is the last version that does not have to phone-home to enable itself) so I disabled almost all the anti-malware and as much of the automatic updating of the OS as I can (impossible to disable all the automatic updating in windows 10)... so my "meddlin'" in things might be the problems I am seeing and have nothing to do with SightHound or the SSD.

[Semper Vaporo]

Sorry... I forgot to address your 2nd question...

I have not played with this, but assuming you are using Windows... click the Start button and type in "Task Scheduler". In Task Scheduler you can select a program to run at boot-up but delay it for a number of minutes. See if that will help you.