Storage Recycling in Nx Witness

What is storage recycling?

Storage Recycling is the method by which the Nx Server application clears out some of the existing archive to make space for newly captured video when a hard drive has reached maximum capacity.

When does the Server begin recycling storage?

Storage recycling begins to occur whenever the available space of Local Disks/NAS/iSCSI is less than the defined reserve space for a drive (e.g. 50GB), When the drive reaches maximum capacity and only the reserve space remains Nx Witness will start to delete the oldest files so that newly captured video can be archived.

How does storage recycling work?

The Nx Server application stores ~1 minute of video from each camera in memory and then, when the memory buffer is full, writes this one minute to available storage.

Video is stored in 1 minute increments by the Nx Server using year, month, day, hour, and minute folders. If you check your recording archive you can see this structure.

When a storage drive is full Nx Witness keeps recording data in ~1-minute increments and will delete the oldest recorded 1-minute file in order to free up space on the drive for the latest 1 minute of captured footage. So, when a drive is full it is safe to say the recycle process occurs about once every minute.

How much data is deleted during storage recycling?

Nx will recycle enough footage to make space for incoming recorded video. 

For example, if the storage is full and the buffer contains 600MB of archived footage, then Nx will delete 600MB in order to be able to store the latest capture video.

This process occurs regardless of the amount of footage being captured and archived by a Server.