IP Camera Archives question

[mohamed_makled]

Hi

i have VSOM server and 2 VSMS servers. i created some simple archives on the VSOM for certain camera and i need to download these archives from VSOM or VSMS to an external hard drive to keep them on this drive.

how can i get these archives from VSMS or VSOM??

waiting your replies.

Thx

[msafawi]

Hi Mohammad,

Are you asking for a different way to download the Archives other than using the "Arhive Clip Form" on VSOM? The Archive Clip Form allows you select the format,  location where to save the clips and the duration.

Thanks,

Maher

PDI Help Desk Physec Team
pdihd-physec@cisco.com

ATP Partners (IPICS/Access Control/Video Surveillance) can open "P D I" cases online at:
http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/tools/pdihd.html#~four
More information about PDI can be found at: 
www.cisco.com/pdihelpdesk
PDI help desk at a Glance:
http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/PDIHelpDesk_AAG.pdf

[mohamed_makled]

Maher

Thanks for your reply.

what i read in the user guide, Archive Clip is used to download a small clip from the archive itself. i mean if the archive is 30 minutes i can save a small clip for 3 minutes from this archive.

what i need to know how can we download the total archives ??? it should be stored in the hard drive of VSMS but how can we get it ??

Thx

[jfiranzi]

Hi Mohamed,

I can tell you where the archive is stored, but want to first caution you that there isn't a supported way of moving this archive to storage, then retrieving it for viewing on another system.  Once you move the archive files, they will no longer be viewable since VSOM would no longer have pointers to the archive in order to play the video.

The supported method would be to create a clip of the portion of the archive, either as a server-side or client-side clip.  You could then copy the clip to your spare drive, or burn to a DVD.  If you have a few archives for which you will always want backups, another method exists which is to define a backup archive pointing to a backup repository (ideally on another media server.)  At a set time after midnight, the video for the previous 24 hours is then copied to the backup repository.  This archive is viewable through VSOM.

If all you are looking to do is preserve the original archive data, you may do it in this way:

Navigate to the VSMC page for the media server for which the camera feed is homed.

At the left under Monitoring > Archives use the pull-down to locate the archive you are interested in saving.

The first three lines under Archive Details would look similar to this:

Archive Name     : a_p_s1_4300__39_fw_1_2_1_1_-_a_archive
Archive Status     : RUNNING
Storage Path     : /media1/1031

In this case we see our archive is on the /media1 partition in the 1031 directory.  From an ssh session logged in as root, we can navigate to the appropriate directory:

DOT59:/ # cd /media1/1031
DOT59:/media1/1031 # ls -lh
total 76K
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 29 23:02 20110329
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 8.0K Mar 30 17:02 20110330
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 8.0K Mar 31 17:04 20110331
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr  1 23:09 20110401
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 8.0K Apr  3 00:31 20110402
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr  3 17:00 20110403
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr  4 17:05 20110404
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr  4 18:01 20110405
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root  248 Apr  4 18:03 media_master

If we want to look at the contents of the date 2011 04/04, we look inside that archive

DOT59:/media1/1031 # cd 20110404
DOT59:/media1/1031/20110404 # ls -lh
total 3.3G
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 7.1M Apr  3 17:06 4d990a08.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 8.6M Apr  3 17:12 4d990b6f.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 8.8M Apr  3 17:18 4d990cd9.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 9.5M Apr  3 17:24 4d990e4c.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 7.9M Apr  3 17:30 4d990fb8.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 9.4M Apr  3 17:36 4d991123.smd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 7.8M Apr  3 17:42 4d991296.smd

(the list continues.)  Each of those files is 5 minutes of video.

If you wanted to back up one day or all days of an archive, you could copy the directories to other media.  As I cautioned before, VSOM will not be able to play, clip or otherwise maniuplate the copy of the archive directories.

I hope that helps,

Jim