Last week, we received feedback from a partner vendor that after the customer’s QVR recordings on their NAS were full, they directly removed the hard drives from the NAS, installed a new set of hard drives, and reconfigured the storage space. Their plan was to reinsert those hard drives into the NAS when they needed to access the files in the future.
Honestly, just hearing about this approach made me break out in a cold sweat, since under the NAS architecture, this method cannot guarantee data synchronization. Due to QVR’s design, in addition to the recording files, there are also index files containing event and date information. Forcibly swapping drives will likely require rebuilding the indexes, which, while possible, would take a lot of time.
There are actually several recommended methods:
- Use Recording Vault (Beta) – This has a separate topic, so I won’t elaborate here. Considering the convenience of playback, this method will be even more recommended in the future.
- Use HBS: This is the more traditional approach. By setting up scheduled backup tasks with Hybrid Backup Sync, you can back up the entire recording folder to another location, such as the cloud or an external hard drive. If you choose an external hard drive as the destination, you can ensure that the backed-up data can be safely removed from the NAS system. When the external storage is full, you can simply replace it with a new external hard drive. This method is much safer than the one initially described.
The final recommendation for the customer is to use HBS and set it to “Copy” mode, ensuring that even if the source recordings are deleted, the backup recordings will not be deleted.
This way, the customer only needs to swap out external hard drives, and no longer has to worry about RAID rebuilding or index rebuilding issues.