Hi BigRed,

That's quite a bit of data for 3 months! How often is your camera recording, what settings are you using for quality, framerate, and resolution? We typically recomend that that camera should not be recording more data than you have time to review on a daily basis.

With that said, I can also clarify some things about how external storage works...

Here's an excerpt from the manual:

"Use the External Storage icon to configure your appliance to store data on the optional Extended Storage System or a network attached storage (NAS) device (a Windows share or an NFS mount). A maximum of 5000 objects such as alerts and picture clips can be stored using External Storage. Sensor readings do not count against the maximum number of objects stored."

The important part here is that alerts and pictures clips are categorized separately from the sensor readings that you are specifying a longer sensor value history for. So by your telling the motion sensor to store 1 year of history, it just means that we are storing 1 years worth of the motion sensor switching back and forth between 0 (No Motion) and 1 (Motion Detected). This sensor could then be graphed for up to 1 year at a time. I'm pretty sure this is not what your looking, and that you probably want to set this sensor value history of the camera sensor to a standard 8 hours or so. The only sensors you want a longer history on are ones that you want to be able to graph over a long term. The remaining storage on the external repository will fill up with alerts (motion clips or high temp alarms would be examples of alerts/objects) until it reaches 5000, and then it will continue to store the most recent 5000 objects on a FIFO basis.

Hope this helps!

-Mike

Well, sort of. One major limitation to your expectations is that a single NetBotz motion capture clip cannot be larger than 8MB. This is depicted by the capture settings of the camera itself, and you can modify the max frame rate, image quality, and length of recording but the end result will always be a clip of 8mb or less. A clip typically starts when motion is detected and records for the length of time that you specify under capture settings. Then then does not start recording again until motion stops, and then begins again.

So if your capture settings are set for recording 30second clips, and you wave at the camera for 10 minutes with no breaks in the motion, you will have a clip of the first 30 seconds of you waving at it. Same scenario, but you stop waving after 5 minutes, and then start again for 5 more minutes. Then you'll have two 30 second clips, one from the start of waving, and one from after you stopped waving and started again.

Your correct, that these are not designed for 24/7 recording and storage of surveillance data, but rather meant for capturing images of critical times or events. But with that said, if you got 'em, use 'em for something!

The short answer for your original question is two fold. If you want it to use less space, then you have to specify in external storage that only x amount of space on the remote repository can be used. To take more advantage of this space, you'll want to lower your image quality, resolution, and length of the clip.