Technical overview

Edge Storage in video surveillance is the ability for a camera to record video and audio to an onboard storage media component such as memory cards inside the camera. These Edge Storage recordings can later be retrieved by the surveillance system.

Milestone XProtect VMS products can retrieve these Edge Storage recordings upon three conditions:

• Upon the VMS reestablishing a lost connection to the camera

• Upon an event or a time schedule triggering a retrieval rule

• Upon a manual request from users of the XProtect Smart Client

The VMS can lose the connection to the cameras for various reasons. This can for instance happen when cameras that are mounted in vehicles or are body-worn cameras, are temporarily outside of network reach. Another reason can be in case of faults or maintenance of network or servers where the VMS either cannot reach the camera or the VMS service is not running. In all these cases, the missing recordings can be retrieved automatically from the camera’s Edge Storage to the central recording server once the connection to the camera is reestablished.

In addition to functioning as a kind of failover recording devices, Edge Storage cameras can also be used as the primary recording location by storing the recordings in the camera until needed by the VMS or its users, at which point it can be retrieved from the camera.