How to Never Lose a Frame of Surveillance Footage

Protect against network failure with edge recording

In the event of a network outage, writing to an IP camera’s SD card – also known as ‘edge recording’ ensures no data is lost. H.265 compression capabilities, coupled with advances in SD card technology, also mean that more data can now be stored locally.

But ideally – especially if you have a lot of cameras across your surveillance estate – you don’t want to be recording to cameras all the time. Replacing cards could get very costly. One option is to prioritise cameras for continuous edge recording, selecting only those most vital to operations. But a preferable alternative may be a solution like our Intelligent Edge Recording, which uses in-built camera memory to store a cache of video footage, only writing to the SD card if the Synectics IP camera cannot connect to networked storage hardware.

Backfill for uninterrupted footage

We advise that any edge recording solution is accompanied by backfilling functionality – provided by your security and surveillance software solution – to ensure footage isn’t held in multiple locations, which is time-consuming to piece back together.

With Synergy, our backfilling functionality means that when Synectics Intelligent Edge Recording is used, the system keeps track of when and where footage is being recorded to SD cards, and automatically restores this footage to the primary storage server once available.

While backfilling occurs, IP cameras continue to stream and record as normal, and once backfilling is completed, the operator can play back footage from before, during and after the period seamlessly.

Hot swap functionality for malfunction or maintenance

So-called ‘hot swap’ technology is another option for guarding against hardware failure. It offers the ability to automatically relocate recording to a suitable available device in the event of something like an encoder or storage server malfunction. This can also be a scheduled temporary relocation of footage, for instance, if system maintenance is required.

As with backfilling, when hot swap storage is employed with Synergy, the system keeps track of any relocated footage to ensure seamless viewing and playback. We recommend that any hot swap server is minimally as big as the largest server.

Protect against power outages

It’s also important to think about things like the power supply. For edge recording and backfilling to occur in the event of a PoE network switch failure, an additional power supply to cameras is required.

For this reason, you should always look for IP cameras, and other system hardware, that offer hot swap dual power sources. If one supply fails, the other will kick in.

One thing to keep in mind, though. Check with your supplier about how their cameras react when detecting power loss. Some cameras will automatically reboot if either power supply cuts out for any reason, which may result in downtime. Synectics IP cameras have been designed to eliminate this risk.