Replacing a video clip drive question

nethfel
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Joined: Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:59 pm

Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by nethfel »

Hi all,

I've acquired a few new drives for our BI system. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of spare SATA ports on the MB, which means I can install one additional new one, but I'll have to yank one of the old ones to install the other additional new one. Is there a procedure for this? (right now I have a 500g boot drive, 8tb video drive, 4tb video drive installed. I have 2 new 8tb drives, one of which will replace the 4tb drive).

Thanks in advance!
nethfel
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:59 pm

Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by nethfel »

Yeah, I've had to major data transfers before - it honestly sucks :( Let's say we were willing to sacrifice the footage on the 4tb drive; I assume I'd have to get BI to reconcile its DB with what is actually on the new drive?
jondwalters
Posts: 21
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2019 11:49 am

Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by jondwalters »

Here's what I've done in the past:

1. Install the new drive
2. Create folders for whatever video you want on the new drive
3. Start Blue Iris and go into the settings and point the data storage to the new drive
4. Copy all of the footage from the old drive to the appropriate folder(s) on the new drive
5. Remove the old drive
6. Repair the DB in Blue Iris. It'll go through and find all of the old videos and reindex them. Depending on how many videos you have, this could take a long time.

Hope this helps!
IAmATeaf
Posts: 464
Joined: Mon Jun 17, 2019 7:48 pm

Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by IAmATeaf »

I had previously posted on this thread as I had gone through the process of replacing one of my drives.

Have just purchased another drive so will be replacing the other in the next day or two.
IAmATeaf
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Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by IAmATeaf »

Well finally got round to replacing the 2nd 2Tb drive with an 8Tb drive.

What I did was connect the new drive to another PC, get it formatted etc, I used a block size of 64Kb rather than the default which I think is 8Kb.

Then with the BI PC still running and recording I used Robocopy.exe using the /MIR option to copy the BI folder from the old drive over to the new drive, did this overnight as this will take a few hours and depends on the size of data to be copied. The drive I was copying had 1.76Tb of recordings on it.

This morning I went into BI then paused the recordings, then set the BI service to Disabled and then stopped the service. Then shut the PC down. Swapped over the drives and powered it back on.

I then put the old drive I had taken out into the other PC and with BI still stopped ran Robocopy with the /MIR option to copy any new/updated files since I last ran the command from the old drive to the new drive. This should complete much quicker as it will only copy over any differences it sees, on my system this only took 12 mins to complete.

I then set the BI service back to Automatic and started it, then ran the BI GUI to check alerts and recordings, finally in Storage I then increased the size to take into account the new disk size.

Reason for using a 2nd PC is my BI PC is in the loft and I didn’t fancy working up there and doing it this way allows the BI PC to keep recording. Last time I replaced the first 2Tb drive with a 6Tb drive I bought the BI PC down, the file copy then took over 6 hours to complete and while it was doing this BI was out of action as all the cabling for my cams is in the loft.

Reason I used Robocopy is that I knew that some of the files being copied would be locked open by BI and Robocopy allows for options on the command line for the number of retries and then skipping whereas using Windows Explorer it sits there waiting for you to skip or retry so I knew that the copy would complete overnight. Also Robocopy will copy over the date stamps for both files and folders and is much quicker than using Windows Explorer.

One word of caution, when using Robocopy with the /MIR option is make sure your command line options and source and destination are 100% correct. The /MIR will exactly mirror the contents of the source to the destination and if you get the source wrong it will start to delete files on the destination to exactly match the content of the source folder. So for example if your source folder is empty Robocopy will start to delete files on the destination folder to empty it out so that the content matches the source!
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YrbkMgr
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Location: Chicagoland

Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by YrbkMgr »

Maybe I'm not understanding the goal but if I do, I've done this half a dozen times successfully. I use backup software (Macrium Reflect) to image the old drive (a backup). Then remove the 4 tb, put in the 8 tb, assign it whatever letter the old one was (shouldn't change anyway), then restore the backup to the new drive. BI won't know the difference.

FWIW, I'm a hardcore Macrium Reflect evangelist. There's a free version for home use - I used it for a year and bought it. Regardless of the software, basically create an image and restore it to the new drive.

Am I missing something?
  • "Whenever I take something apart to fix it and put it back together again, I end up with like six really important looking pieces left over" -Tim Allen
  • If you know what your after, you'll recognize it when you see it.
IAmATeaf
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Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by IAmATeaf »

No not missing that is another way of doing it. How does Macrium cope with a live partition that is actively being written to by BI while it’s making a copy ?

I did it the way I did to minimise down time and it also gave me the chance to format the drive with a larger block size.
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TimG
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Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by TimG »

and it also gave me the chance to format the drive with a larger block size.
Can you explain what advantage this has ? Is it something we all should be doing ?
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IAmATeaf
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Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by IAmATeaf »

TimG wrote:
and it also gave me the chance to format the drive with a larger block size.
Can you explain what advantage this has ? Is it something we all should be doing ?
I said block above but it really is termed a cluster.

The default cluster size in W10 is I think 4k for drives under 16Tb so any data written will use a 4k cluster at minimum. So a 100 byte file would occupy a 4k cluster with the remaining space effectively wasted as a cluster of data can’t be shared, a 6k file would occupy 2 4k clusters and so on. A 1Mb file would use 256 clusters but with a 64k cluster size it would only need 16.

In cases where you know that most of the data written will consist of large files like video files increasing the cluster size can make reading and writing data more efficient which is why I increased the cluster size to 64k.

Hope that makes some sense.
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YrbkMgr
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Re: Replacing a video clip drive question

Post by YrbkMgr »

IAmATeaf wrote: Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:43 am No not missing that is another way of doing it. How does Macrium cope with a live partition that is actively being written to by BI while it’s making a copy ?

I did it the way I did to minimise down time and it also gave me the chance to format the drive with a larger block size.
Macrium copes with live partitions by taking a snapshot image, and backs up the snapshot. But it has a crap ton of different ways to skin the cat. I don't have enough experience to know what would happen if you formatted with 64K clusters first and then restored an image created with a different cluster size. I'd try that before resorting to robocopy for this task, that's for sure. One fell swoop - restore the data, BI won't know the difference.

Macrium is free - no annoyware. It works out of the box, you might want to install it and check it out. There is top notch forum support for free and best in class email support for customers. Been a life saver and essential tool for me, so I bought it.
  • "Whenever I take something apart to fix it and put it back together again, I end up with like six really important looking pieces left over" -Tim Allen
  • If you know what your after, you'll recognize it when you see it.
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