Preserving Motion Events Long-Term

[sabin]

# Need Help: Preserving Motion Events Long-Term with Large Camera System (40+ TB Storage)

## System Details
- Blue Iris version: - latest as of april 2025
- 25 cameras currently active (will be 50-55 total soon)
- Windows OS
- 40TB storage currently available (willing to add more if needed)
- Getting 8,000-9,000 motion events per day with 25 cameras

## The Problem
I recently experienced a database crash after a Windows update/restart, which caused me to lose all my motion detection markers while still having the raw footage. This made it impossible to quickly navigate to motion events without manually scrubbing through footage.

Additionally, Blue Iris warns me when I exceed 300,000 motion events, but with my current setup, I might reach this number in just 12-15 days. I need to preserve motion events for at least 120 days (potentially ~3 million events).

## What I'm Trying to Achieve
1. Preserve motion detection markers for 3-4 months minimum
2. Be able to quickly select 1-3 cameras and view their motion events within a specific date range
3. Avoid the database size limitation warnings
4. Create a reliable backup solution for these motion events

## Solutions I've Considered
I've thought about creating a new database weekly and backing up the old one, but this seems cumbersome - if I need to check footage from multiple weeks, I'd need to load different databases and wait for Blue Iris to scan through 40TB+ of video.

## Questions
1. Is there any way to increase the motion event limit beyond 300,000?
2. What's the most efficient way to backup/preserve motion detection markers?
3. Would a different storage architecture help (SQL database, cloud backup)?
4. Are there any third-party tools that might help manage this volume of events?
5. How do others with large camera systems handle this issue?

Any advice from those running larger systems would be greatly appreciated. I'm open to investing in additional hardware/software if needed to solve this long-term.

Thanks in advance!

[M32Z]

Here's what I would do... Create a backup of all the blue iris folders, version and install contained inside of a VHDX file mount the VHDX according to your liking either inside of a virtual machine or if you know what you are doing make it on the local computer. You might even be able to get away with having an iSCSI mount as a system to store your backups as well; find what works with you. You could try something even more basic and just move the files and keep them attached using symbolic links, but I don't know for sure if this works I am still playing with it; I think the database regeneration required a hard linked file. Best bet is Make a shadowcopy VHDX using sysinternals and then boot the machine in a virtual machine (you can't mount it on the same machine as the one you are running (or the drive will not mount, signature collision). Make a backup of the database and configuration files., the backup of your computer is for a just in case, and make sure to unselect any drives that aren't the boot drive, you don't want an entire backup of all 40TB in addition to the 40TB. So you will have 2 things: a vhdx backup of your booting machine that contains blue iris (after you make a boot image you can trim down the OS and virtual machine to only contain Blue iris and any essentials). It will be alot of work but you will have an environment in order to organize your footage. Then make regular database backups every so often ( you may actually have to create an entire backup of all the footage initially depending on how you have the drives, paths, folders setup) and please be careful think and plan things through thoroughly before executing anything, that is why the VM idea is the best. Just setup the VM then point it to the files ( you may even be able to configure the VM access to read only! *on the video files) have your DB on the VM separate from your production/live DB. Good luck.

[BruceH]

This sounds like there would be potentially multiple copies of BI running at the same time, if I am understanding this very complicated way of doing this, although I have no suggestions on how to do this with the limitations that BI has for record storage!