7.5.1. Archives

Archives provide a way to store recordings long-term that will end up deleted from the system’s internal storage due to retention settings and/or disk space availability. The NexLog DX-Series archives page allows you to view the status of and perform actions on your archive drives.

NexLog DX-Series supports three types of Archive Drives.

  • Physical with removable media

  • Network

  • Portable

Physical

This archive type is physically part of the recorder, such as Blu-ray multi-drives and RDX cartridges. These archive drives are purchased with and licensed for use with your recorder. Since they are part of the chassis, these archive drives will always show up in your list of archive drives, regardless of whether media is currently present.

Network

These archive types are not physically connected to the recorder, the recorder has no way to automatically detect these. They must be manually added to the recorder via the Archive Configuration page. These archive drives include Network Attached Storage (NAS) Devices and Centralized Archives, which is where one NexLog DX-Series archives call records to another NexLog DX-Series Recorder’s database over the network.

Portable

This archive type is physically connected and disconnected dynamically to the recorder, for example, external USB hard drives or USB flash drives. These archive drives will only show up on the setup page when they are physically connected to the recorder.

At the top of the Archives Page, is a list of all the current Archive Drives in the system. To the left is the archive drive name, consisting of the drive type and the number of the drive on the system. Next is a box showing the current status of the drive as well as a status bar giving a quick at-a-glance indication of how full the drive is.

Archive Display in Configuration Manager

Fig. 7.83 Archive Display in Configuration Manager

Note that this display is redundant when using the Front Panel locally. The Info screen has a similar implementation with the same functionality.

To the right of the status indication is a count of how many calls are currently archived to the archive drive. If the drive is one that supports removable media, the number of calls on the currently inserted media is displayed. To perform an action on an archive drive, you must first click the drive to select the one you wish to take action on, and then click the action button below which corresponds to the action you wish to perform. Actions that are not applicable to the currently selected archive drive, due either to the drive type or to the status of the drive, will be grayed out.

The available actions are:

Start Archiving

Enable archiving to the selected drive. Call Records will begin transferring to the archive oldest-first beginning at the timestamp indicated by the current archive pointer for that drive (see Section 7.5.2 Archive Configuration). Call Records that meet the criteria for archiving to this drive will continue transferring one at a time until archiving is stopped (either manually or due to a condition set under ‘Configure’), the drive fills up or another exception occurs (such as an error writing to the media). Once the archive pointer catches up to the current time, calls that meet the configured archive criteria will be transferred as they are recorded.

Stop Archiving

Stops archiving to the selected drive. Call Records will cease transferring until archiving is started again.

Eject

For an archive drive with removable media, such as a Blu-ray, this button will cause the CD Tray to open so the media can be removed. For other archive drives, such as a USB Drive, this action will render the drive safe to be unplugged without the risk of losing or corrupting data on the drive.

Browse

This loads the current archive for browsing and playback from both the Front Panel and MediaWorks DX. When an archive drive is in browse mode, new calls cannot be archived to it until it is first taken out of browse mode.

Period Archive

Period archive allows you to manually archive a time range to an archive. It also allows you optionally select only protected media to be archived. Media must be formatted without any calls on it before period archiving can be used.

Format

For archive types that can be formatted by the recorder, this action will perform a format. Formatting the media will delete all existing data currently stored on the drive, whether it is an existing NexLog DX-Series Archive, or data belonging to some other device or operation system. Always double-check the media before you format it.

Media Info

Displays additional information about the media currently inserted into the drive.

Print Label

This allows you to print a label containing information about the contents of a Blu-ray archive.