Question about removing storage
Answered
Hi, I am new here, I have done a search of past forum posts, but nothing really tells me what I am after, hence my post.
We have two servers a main and a backup/failover, we have approx 80TB of storage all via SMB shares from both a Synology and some onboard of the main server. We have just over 80 cameras, I am looking at implementing a new active server soon, to deal with more cameras in the planning.
What I want to do is remove some of the storage from the main server, I have setup the Synology (12Bay with 3x Raid-5 arrays) so that there are several share;s and various NICs/IP addresses assigned to various shares to share the load across the 4x NICs both on the Syno and the Server. The idea is to stand up another server and move some Cams to that and move some of the current storage (via SMB shares) to that new server.
But here is the issue, how do I essentiallly remove a storage set and not end up with lost data, clearly the oldest data will fall off, however can NX move recent data thats on the storage to be removed to the remaining storage (with oldest being removed) and not leave gaps in storage?
If so how is that achieved, my thinking is, if I turn off a storage member (via green slide button on the right) but leave it there, NX will shuffle it around to not leave gaps (but loose oldest) and once that is done and re indexed I can then actually "Remove" it.
Any comments appreciated.
Regards Stephen
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As there is no official reply just yet, here is my experience & recommendation.
To retire storage without data loss is a simple matter of time, and there are a couple of approaches.
Disabling recording to a drive still leaves the video archive available to the nx system, but it no longer expires according to the camera recording retention policy [as far as I know] - basically read only.
Leaving storage enabled & moving cameras to another server & storage path will continue to expire the archive, according to the camera recording retention policy - sort of an auto cleansing approach.
So, if you don't want to set a recording retention policy [per camera, also doable via multiple select], then I would just disable the retiring recording path and reformat / repurpose it after a period of time. This approach also works in single server systems
A 3rd option suited to server retirement & utilizing the same storage during a transition is to use the same storage path for 2 or more servers (not usually recommended). Set a camera recording retention policy, but do not disable storage, & move cameras to a new server - but with the same archive path. Retire the old server after the retention policy max period, then remove or adjust the recording retention policy as desired. Since version 5, the archive folder hierarchy now includes the server hardware ID by default, so mitigates reindex issues.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/resources.vmsproxy.com/nx_vms_manual/archive_retention.html
Kind regards,
Andrew Sharrem
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Hi Andrew, thanks for taking the time to respond, so your assesment is pretty much as I assumed, turn the storage off as an archive, it will remain available as read only, once a desired time frame has passed (during which archive on that storage can still be viewed in the timeline) remove from the server and I am then free to attach it as storage on a new server.
Will give it a go and report back in a month of so.
Cheers Stephen
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Hi Stephen Abbot,
What Andrew Sharrem said. ;-)
You also could move the old data to the new storage and reindex the new storage, and let it rotate there, but for 80 TB this will take a fair bit of time. This way the old storage device becomes available faster.
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