Blue Iris

In the beginning of January, one evening, I suddenly noticed that my BI instance was showing that I had no clips in the Web UI, although it was still reporting 98%+ disk usage as was typical. When I logged into the machine running BI, I found that the Blue Iris volume only had a couple hundred GB in use vs the ~2TB that it had. Upon investigation, I found that what was still present were old, orphaned BVR files, some dating back as far as 2018. As I looked at the Video folder, I noticed that it seemed like every few minutes, the list of current images would get shorter. I suspect Blue Iris did this for some reason, and the reason I suspect that is only 'current' clips were deleted, meaning those in the 'Video' and 'Stored' folders that hadn't met the criteria to be deleted automatically. Old files that would/should have been purged LONG ago weren't touched, like it didn't even know they existed (and it probably didn't because they were probably purged from the DB long ago but for some reason they didn't actually get deleted from the volume). I'm currently on 5.4.6.3, and my 'Clips and archiving' settings are New are stored in 'Video' with a size limit of 200GB, at which point they get moved to 'Stored', which as a size limit of 1.4TB, and at that limit, old clips are deleted. This has been working very well without issues like this for a number of years.

Is this something anyone has seen, and does anyone have any thoughts on how to determine what happened and how to prevent this in the future?

I don't remember any specific problems with v5.4.6.3, but why not update to v5.5.4.5 to see if that sorts it out. It's been working well here for a few days.

Otherwise, have a look in the log to see if it tells you what it is doing. You can make the log save to a text file to help with this, but don't forget to turn it off again.

If New and Stored are in the same drive then don’t bother moving clips around, just use either New or Stored set to the available space and set to BI to manage the space but not based upon clip age.

This doesn’t help you with your current problem though. What I’ve found is that if a clip file doesn’t appear within the clip list then BI won’t manage that file or files so you need to work out which is which and manually decide what to do with the orphaned files.

Basically, when I discovered it, I restarted the service and that seemed to stop it. hasn't done it since. I poked around the logs best I could but nothing stood out to me.

IAmATeaf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 8:40 pm If New and Stored are in the same drive then don’t bother moving clips around, just use either New or Stored set to the available space and set to BI to manage the space but not based upon clip age.

This doesn’t help you with your current problem though. What I’ve found is that if a clip file doesn’t appear within the clip list then BI won’t manage that file or files so you need to work out which is which and manually decide what to do with the orphaned files.

Yeah, I guess moving them around doesn't really matter. The the orphaned clips were mostly really old so I nuked them.

The fact that the ones that were left were really old and almost certainly no longer in the clip list is why I suspect somehow, BI went off into the weeds.

What sticks out to me is

my 'Clips and archiving' settings are New are stored in 'Video'

By default, even though configured on the same drive, the New and Stored folders are configured to “cascade.” Recordings begin in the New folder, and are then later moved to Stored after a period of time, and are then finally deleted after another period of time.
How have you structured these folders such that "Video" is in the mix? Maybe post a screenshot of your C&A tab.

Also any clips that are marked as protected are not subject to the retention policies in C&A. The will live where they are forever unless you manually manage them. And best practices are to use the clips list options (context menu) to move, copy, etc. so that the DB knows where they are or where they went.

It was configured so new clips go to 'New' (BlueIris\Video) with a size limit of 200GB, at which point they got moved to 'Stored' (BlueIris\Stored) with a size limit of 1400GB, no time restrictions/setting, only size. This has been configured like this for at least four years without a hiccup until January. And interestingly, it happened again this past weekend - I don't know when it started, but I noticed it Sunday around noon. The fact that this time was at about the same point in the month as the first time is 'interesting'. Since it doesn't really matter one way or the other since they're all on the same volume, I simplified it down to all clips go to 'New', with a size limit of 1800GB and then it starts deleting.

I don't know if this will help or not, but I will pass along some observations I have made messing with the BI clips.
One of the problems I was fighting is that clips are not being deleted when the disk gets full. I tried to change the size of the file and to change the delete parameters: ie shorten the date. What I found is if I shorten the length of time to keep NEW or STORED clips, BI does not seem to delete any that are older than the new date. If I change the STORED clip days from 15 to 12 days, the clips between 12 and 15 days or older are not purged. I had to delete them manually. I also am thinking that I had to restart the computer to get all the new parameters read into the Blue Iris service. It seems to have worked for me.
One of the missing pieces of information is exactly how much space does BI need. I figured this out by going into the STORED directory, calculating the number of days using the video date, and divide the total hard drive space used by the number of cameras and the number of days. That gives you MB per day per camera. Multiply by number of cameras to get the number of days you need for storage. You need to know the number of MB per camera in case you add another camera. Also I had to watch and not count partial days.
Then set the hard drive space accordingly. 15 cameras times MB per camera divided by hard drive space gives you the total days you can have. Allow for errors and camera additions. I had to set the number of days kept under that which is possible to keep. If I had space for 15 days, I would set the delete to 12 days to make sure I had space to use when I needed it.
I'm guessing, but I think if I set this incorrectly, BI cannot write to disk if the storage space is full, and I get the processor tied up figuring this out. I think this is why BI crashes unexpectedly from time to time. And also why some cameras have "Loss of Signal" errors because the processor is busy with the hard drive problem and the camera disconnects.
As far as the disk usage being 98%, I discovered I needed to ignore everything people were saying and go to the basics. I'm running a I9-10700 which has quicksync 2 (H265). I set all this up on 17 cameras (took me weeks to get it to work due to other factors). BI kept crashing my computer. I finally went back to H264 on all my cameras and use no hardware acceleration. Now my computer no longer locks up. Utilization is in the 20% range without all that junk. Lots of memory. Get 16 gbyte. The nice benefit to this is ODM will work, too. ODM won't work on H265.
What affects "Loss of Signal" is the hardware. We have a 10gB network. All wiring is Cat6A. Cameras are all 100 mbit. Data rate on the entire network is about 35mbit. Older POE splitters created a lot of "Loss of Signal" errors which went down after installing a POE+ switch.
With all these changes, I'm running without crashing, about 20% utilization, and a Loss of Signal count of maybe 1 per day.
It's been a real pain for me. BTW the cameras are 5mp Inseun PTZ POE.
Good luck with your installation. Blue Iris is a very nice program, so don't give up.