First of all, do you back up your video surveillance recordings to a dedicated backup device? Vote:
A recent discussion about Solid State Drives Useful For NVRs got me thinking about backing up. In many industries, backing up of servers is done at night when there is little or nothing happening on the server. Video surveillance happens around the clock and may be recording during the night which has the potential to interfere with backups.
- What do you do to back up the recordings on VMS servers? Do you simply use something like RAID 6, so that there is some level of redundancy in a disk array, or do you back up to a dedicated backup device?
- What is your favorite backup solution for video surveillance recordings?
- When and how frequently do you back up your video surveillance recordings?
- Did you ever have to recover a recording from the backup and, if so, did you recover it successfully and painlessly?
Obviously answers to these questions will vary depending upon whether you are supporting a VMS with just a few or many cameras. For just a few cameras, I like CrashPlan which is free backup software for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It also has paid options but that buys online backup space which I don't feel is very practical for a large volume of video surveillance recordings. I just record to local media and don't use any cloud facilities.
I'd be very interested to learn what other IPVM members do. Thank you for any suggestions.