First off, let me say Vitamin D has been a great product. I've been testing it for a few weeks for potential use in seven installations with seven copies of the Pro installation. This issue has put me on the fence on the buying decision, so I'm hoping to find some form of resolution:
I just fell victim to this:
http://www.vitamindinc.com/support/ref_ ... ps_42.html
"Error message says, "Your database is corrupt, Vitamin D must close now"
In the rare but exceedingly unfortunate event that the database is corrupted due to power loss, event history is lost because it is stored in the database. The video files then get cleaned up because they are no longer in the database, but if you copy them out before starting up again, you may be able to recover the video."
I had a power outage at my facility. The design of how Vitamin D responds to this situation is, if I may be honest, a supremely bad one.
1. At a bare minimum you should strongly advise your customers that Vitamin D systems need to be installed on a UPS, otherwise you will may lose 100% of your video in a power out situation.
2. At a minimum, the dialog that says "Your database is corrupt, Vitamin D must close now" should at least say "Your database is corrupt, Vitamin D must close now. PLEASE NOTE that upon restarting Vitamin D all your video files will be deleted. If you wish to save them, back them up before restarting Vitamin D" or something similar.
3. More ideally, in the dialog above you should give an option to backup the database. This could be as simple as renaming the top-folder vitamin D video file "archive" folder "archive-backup", then creating a new "archive" folder.
4. Yet more ideally, you should deal with "database corruption" in a better way.
- Consider writing a seperate transactional text log file of events, that can be re-imported if the database becomes corrupt.
- Offer an option to backup the database file every 24 hours, or a user specified number of hours.
5. Most ideally, you should consider a different database engine that is not as sensitive to power-off corruption.
I have a few follow up questions:
1. Where are the database file(s) located, so I may set up a my own automated backup of the file.
2. What database engine are you using to store your data?
3. Do you have any other suggestions on how to prevent this situation or manage it better?
Thank you again for creating an otherwise great product.