Milestone XProtect Advanced VMS 2014 - Manual (Page 64)

Milestone XProtect ® Advanced
VMS 2014
Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 64 Management Client elements
To avoid that the recording database runs full, you can create additional storages. You can also create
archives within each storage and start an archiving process to store data.
Archiving is the automatic transfer of recordings from, for example, a camera's default database to
another location. In this way, the amount of recordings that you can store is not limited to the size of
the recording database. With archiving you can also back up your recordings to another media.
You configure storage and archiving on a per-recording server basis.
As long as you store archived recordings locally or on accessible network drives, you can use
XProtect Smart Client to view them with. This is also how you view recordings stored in a cameras'
regular databases.
The following mostly mentions cameras and video, but speakers, microphones, audio and sound also
apply.
Important: Milestone recommends that you use a dedicated hard disk drive for the recording server
database to prevent low disk performance. When you format the hard disk, it is important to change its
Allocation unit size setting from 4 to 64 kilobytes. This is to significantly improve recording
performance of the hard disk. You can read more about allocating unit sizes and find help at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365/en-us .
Important: The oldest data in a database is always auto-archived (or deleted if no next archive is
defined) when less than 5GB of space is free. If less than 1GB space is free, data is deleted. A
database always requires 250MB of free space. If you reach this limit because data is not deleted fast
enough, no more data is written to the database until you free up enough space. The actual maximum
size of your database becomes the amount of gigabytes that you specify, minus 5GB.
Attaching devices to a recording server
Once you have configured the storage and archiving settings for a recording server, you can enable
storage and archiving for individual cameras or a group of cameras. This is done from the individual
devices or from the device group. See Attach a device or group of devices to a storage (on page 67).
Effective archiving
When you enable archiving for a camera or a group of cameras, the content of the camera database is
automatically moved to an archive at intervals that you define.
Depending on your requirements, you can configure one or more archives for each of your databases.
Archives can be located either on the recording server computer itself, or at another location which
can be reached by the system, for example on a network drive.
By setting up your archiving in an effective way, you can prune and groom your database storage
usage if needed. Often, you want to make archived recordings take up as little space as possible
especially on a long-term basis, where it is perhaps even possible to slacken image quality a bit. You
can handle effective pruning and grooming from the Storage tab of a recording server by adjusting
several interdependent settings:

Recording database retention

Recording database size

Archive retention

Archive size

Archive schedule

Encryption