Storage
Storage pools, balancing, mirroring, retention, and legal hold.
Recorded footage lives in storage pools, managed on the Storage page. A pool is a place recordings can be written: a local disk path or a network share.
Pool types
- Local — a directory on the box's own disks. The install creates a local pool by default.
- SMB — a Windows/NAS file share.
- NFS — a Unix/NAS export.
- iSCSI — a dedicated block LUN on a SAN/NAS, formatted and mounted by the box.
Adding a network pool
Add pools from the Storage page's Add storage wizard — never by hand-mounting shares on the host; the wizard hands the mount to a privileged helper that manages it safely and remounts it on every boot.
- Choose the protocol (SMB / NFS / iSCSI) and enter the share details and credentials.
- Use Test connection — it performs a real mount and teardown before anything is saved.
- Save. The pool comes online and starts taking recordings immediately — no restart.
NAS-side requirements:
| Protocol | Requirement |
|---|---|
| SMB | A share user with write permission; SMB 2.1 or newer (3.x preferred). |
| NFS | Export with rw and uid mapping that lets the box write (v3/v4.x). |
| iSCSI | A dedicated LUN. Optional CHAP authentication. |
A blank iSCSI LUN must be formatted before use — the wizard requires you to type FORMAT to confirm, because this erases the LUN. A LUN that already carries an ext4 filesystem mounts as-is; any other filesystem is refused.
Balancing across pools
With multiple pools, new recordings are distributed automatically based on free space, so no pool fills while another sits idle. A specific camera can also be pinned to a specific pool in its recording settings (Recording).
If a network pool's share drops, it shows offline on the Storage and Health pages; recording continues on the remaining pools, the box keeps retrying the mount, and footage already on the share is untouched.
Mirroring (redundancy)
A camera can be set to mirror its recordings to a second pool. Losing one pool — a dead disk, an unreachable NAS — then loses nothing for that camera. Use it for the cameras you cannot afford to lose.
Retention
Retention rules decide how long footage is kept, enforced continuously and automatically:
- By age — delete segments older than N days.
- By size — cap the total bytes footage may occupy.
- By capacity — keep a minimum free-space headroom on the pool; oldest footage is pruned first when space runs low.
Size your storage for retention × bitrate × cameras and let capacity-based retention be the safety net, not the primary policy.
Legal hold
Footage under legal hold is exempt from all retention — it will never be auto-deleted, regardless of age or disk pressure. Place a hold on the recordings tied to an incident as soon as you know they matter; release the hold when the case closes and normal retention resumes.
Removing a pool
Removing a pool unmounts and forgets it. Removal is refused while the pool still holds recordings — let retention drain it (or wait for holds to be released) first. Removing a network pool never deletes footage from the share itself.