Installation - Best Practice for recording space allocation

What’s the minimum storage requirement for QVR Pro recording server on a MOBOTIX NAS

Overview

This document describes how QVR Pro designs to use storage space on the NAS. And a recommend value if plan to use the NAS dedicated to surveillance purposes.

Details

The QVR Pro uses two storage spaces:

  1. Recording Space: A “dedicated” pre-allocated space for save recording data. Recording rotations will be triggered once the recordings are about to exceed the free space and oldest unprotected recording data will be overwritten.
    The recording space can be expanded but cannot be reduced. In case wants to reduce the size of an existing recording space, the only method is to make backup of the recordings, delete, and re-create the recording space.
  2. Database Space: A shared folder that co-exist with other NAS system storage. This space is used to store index for the recording data. And this space is shared by the whole NAS.

If the NAS is running out of shared free space, QVR Pro and other NAS services cloud be unable to start correctly because necessary files on the NAS cannot be created or overwritten.

Best practice

In average camera settings, it is recommended to keep about recording space’s 10% free space on the NAS for the database and other NAS services running smoothly.

For example, a pre-allocated 500GB recording space should have 50GB or more free space available in the system.

As a safety, recent QVR Pro has a limitation that allows to create the recording space at maximum 95% disk usage. Which means at least 5% free space of the storage will be reserved for the database and other system services.