Milestone XProtect Essential 2014 - Manual (Page 119)

Milestone XProtect ® Essential 2014 Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 119 Advanced configuration
If archiving fails
Under rare circumstances, archiving may fail, for example due to network problems. However, in
XProtect Essential this does not pose a threat. XProtect Essential creates a new database and
continues archiving in this new database. You can work with and view both this new database and the
old one like any other databases.
About the benefits of archiving
By default, recordings are stored in your system's database for each camera. The database for each
camera is capable of containing a maximum of 600000 records or 40 GB. However, the maximum size
of a database is not in itself very important: If a database for a camera becomes full, Your system
automatically begins archiving its content, freeing up space in the database. Consequently, having
sufficient archiving space is more important.
In addition to automatic archiving when a database becomes full, you can schedule archiving to take
place at particular times up to 24 times per day. This way, you can proactively archive recordings, so
databases never becomes full. By using archiving, you can also back up archived records on backup
media of your choice, using your preferred backup software.
About archiving locations
The default archiving folder (see "Default File Paths" on page 163) (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 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
47), 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.