restarting archives

[dean-lamb]

Hey,

I have read in some of the docs that an archive, shelved or stopped, can be restarted in VSMC.  I am a little slow and not up to speed yet with the camera system so I was wondering if someone could give me a little guidance as to where you make this happen?  I want to try it in the future instead of removing and recreating the archives when they stop.  Thanks for any and all the help.  Also, are there any good books on the camera system out there?  Any suggested reading material to help me better understand the system and video surveillance in general would be great.                  

[jfiranzi]

Hi Dean,

You are partly correct.  An archive that is stopped because of a normal server shutdown (or even a power failure) should restart on its own when the media server is powered back on, providing no file system corruption has affected the xml file stored on the media server which defines that archive (VSM 6.x).  If an archive is manually stopped ("shelved") however, it cannot be started via normal means.  If it were critical to restart the archives (which it almost never is), there is a way to do this, but not supported or recommended under normal circumstances.  (Restore the media server backup and then restore the VSOM backup.  When the media server is started again, the xml files were restored so the archives defined by them would restart.)  It would be a better practice however to just leave the shelved archives alone and create new archives.  The video in the shelved archives will still be viewable until they are groomed (deleted) due to timing out (days to live) or for space if the media server fills to (by default, 95% or greater.)

I hope that helps,

Jim

[dean-lamb]

THanks for your help.  I thought I saw something about a manual restart but I have never been able to locate that section in any user guide since.  This helps me out a lot.  I don't think I will waste time restoring for just a few down archives.  Now what about archive syncs?  I have seen that when you have archives out of sync you can run a sync process in VSMC I think.  It is another thing I have seen and I beleive I watched a TAC engineer do this after an upgrade but I can't seem to find out where to run it.

THanks for all your time and help.  I really appreciate it.