Ring Downloaded videos, Disk Space, and Nightly Backups.

[SegmentationFault]

I have run into an issue where the downloaded videos from this plugin get included in the nightly backup of my homeseer system. We tend to get a lot of late night activity in front of our ring door bell (mostly wild animals) which we enjoy reviewing the following day and we download many of those videos. (bears, possums, foxes, rabbits, deer, deer with fawns, owls after the poor rabbits, the list goes on and on)

This has caused a couple issues. First the backup's take forever, on the order of 20 minutes, at which point they crash because it looks like the backup code is using an integer for the total size of the file, it overflows (yeah the backups are over 4gigs) throws an error and the backup fails. The failed backups then leave a zombie backup that is multiple gigs in size, and every night a new zombie wanders onto my disk which resulted in a disk drive filled with zombies!

I got the drive full notification, got out my zombie zapper, then moved the video save directory for this plugin to another drive along with 6 gigs of videos. This seems to have fixed the nightly backup issue.

But now the plugin, under the history tab, can't find the videos, or the snapshots. It lists them, but all the images and video links are broken. So I can only watch them by going to the machine they are saved on.

Is there a way for this plugin to exclude the videos and snapshots from the nightly backups? Would it be possible to get a maximum saved size/count for the save videos option so the plugin delete's old videos if the directory gets to large? Also, is there something special that needs to be done to change the save directory so it is accessible from any machine?

[windracer]

Ah, you're right! I hadn't noticed this but yeah my HS backups went from 100k to ~3gb once I started playing around with downloaded clips. Oops!

I was already using symlinks to drop the snapshots and videos out to my NAS, but obviously the local HS backup is just following those links and including the files.

One thing I can think of off the top of my head (for my situation) would be to temporarily unmount the NAS from my HS4 RasPi so the backup couldn't follow the synlinks, then mount it again when the backup is complete.

[avpman]

Which backup software or plugin are you using? I use the plugin BLBackup. You can specify which directories to include/exclude from the backup. Also, FYI - the native HS backup routine doesn't back up the HS root directory - where all the plugin executables are stored.

[SegmentationFault]

This is just the homeseer backup under tools->backup/restore.

[avpman]

This is just the homeseer backup under tools->backup/restore.

Try the BLBackup Plugin. You'll be pleased. It even sends me an email to confirm the backup has been executed.

[windracer]

Belt-and-suspenders type of guy I am, I'm using both the built-in HS4 backup and BLBackup. I set that up so long ago I forgot you could exclude directories with BLBackup. Guess it's time to stop using the built-in backup and just focus on BLBackup and then set the plug-in snapshots and videos folders as exceptions. Thanks for the tip!

[avpman]

Belt-and-suspenders type of guy I am, I'm using both the built-in HS4 backup and BLBackup. I set that up so long ago I forgot you could exclude directories with BLBackup. Guess it's time to stop using the built-in backup and just focus on BLBackup and then set the plug-in snapshots and videos folders as exceptions. Thanks for the tip!

👍👍👍

[SegmentationFault]

The hard drive I keep homeseer on is backed up as a unit and can be restored as a unit if needed. (such as when a plug in reeks havoc with my system) This allows me to roll the system backwards in time as a unit. The homseer backups are there to allow the system to be rolled back to fix minor issues.


I prefer to be conservative about plugins, it was a mistake to tempted by this. It looks like all it does is log into the ring account and act like a client, probably via port 8080. This plugin has broken my history page, it has broken my backups, it has broken my ability to track what is going on at my front door, and if the only fix is to add another plugin to keep this plugin from damaging my system then I'm done. There is no telling how many other systems out there that have been compromised by this plugin.

[windracer]

A few of us have been using dcorsus Ring plug-in for a while and have not had the corruption issues you are describing. Hopefully you are able to restore your HS system though!