Milestone XProtect Professional 2014 - Manual (Page 127)

Milestone XProtect ® Professional
2014
Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 127 Advanced configuration
About archiving locations
The default archiving folder (see "Default File Paths" on page 191) (C:\MediaDatabase) is located on
the system server. You can change the default archiving folder to any other location locally, or select a
location on a network drive to use as the default archiving folder. In the archiving folder, separate
subfolders for storing archives for each camera are automatically created. These subfolders are
named after the MAC address of the hardware device to which the camera is connected.
Because you can keep archives spanning many days of recordings and archiving may take place
several times per day, further subfolders, named with the archiving date and time, are also
automatically created.
The subfolders are named according to the following structure:
...\Archives\CameraMACAddress_VideoEncoderChannel\DateAndTime
If the video encoder does not have several channels, the video encoder channel will always be _1
(example: 00408c51e181_1).
Example: an archiving at 23.15 on 31st December 2012 for a camera with the MAC address
00408c51e181 attached to channel 2 would be stored:
C:\MediaDatabase\Archives\00408c51e181_2\2012-12-31-23-15
About archiving to other locations
When you archive to other locations than the default archiving directory, your system first temporarily
stores the archive in the local default archiving directory, then immediately moves the archive to the
archiving location you have specified. Archiving directly to a network drive can mean that archiving
time varies depending on the available bandwidth on the network. First storing the archive locally, then
moving it speeds up the archiving procedure, and reduces delays in case of network problems.
If you archive to a network drive, the regular camera database can only be stored on a local drive
attached directly to your system's server.
About dynamic archive paths
With dynamic archiving paths, you specify a number of different archiving paths, usually across
several drives. Milestone recommends using dynamic paths (see "Configure storage wizard" on page
44), which also is the default setting when you configure cameras through the Configure video &
recording wizard.
If the path containing the camera's database is on one of the drives you have selected for dynamic
archiving, your system always tries to archive to that drive first. If not, your system automatically
archives to the archiving drive with the most available space at any time, provided a camera database
is not using that drive.
The drive that has the most available space may change during the archiving process, and archiving
may happen to several archiving drives during the same process. This does not have impact on how
users find and view archived recordings.
Dynamic archiving paths are general for all your cameras. You cannot configure dynamic archiving
paths for individual cameras.
When deciding which drives to use for dynamic archiving, consider the pros and cons in the following
examples (in which we assume that the default archiving path is on drive C:
—drive letters are
examples only, different drive letters may of course be used in your organization):

Camera records to drive C: and archives to drive C: