Back up archived recordings

Many organizations want to back up their recordings by using tape drives or similar. Exactly how you do this is highly individual and depends on the backup media used in your organization. However, the following is worth bearing in mind:

Back up archives rather than camera databases

Always create backups based on the content of archives, not based on individual camera databases. If you create backups based on the content of individual camera databases, you may cause sharing violations or other malfunctions.

When scheduling a backup, make sure the backup job does not overlap with your specified archiving times. To view each recording server's archiving schedule in each of a recording server's storage areas, see the Storage tab.

To ensure archiving is not occurring during backup, you can unmount the archive, perform the backup and then mount the archive again. Mounting and unmounting archives is performed through the API Gateway.

 

Know your archive structure so that you can target backups

When you archive recordings, you store them in a certain sub-directory structure within the archive.

During all regular use of your system, the sub-directory structure is completely transparent to the system's users when they browse recordings with XProtect Smart Client. This is true both with archived and non-archived recordings. It is relevant to know the sub-directory structure (see Archive structure (explained) if you want to back up your archived recordings (see Backing up and restoring system configuration).