Recommendation for NAS w/ FTP auto deletion

[n0fx]

I read through the starters guide on how to buy a NAS but I have a special request. I'm looking for a NAS that I can setup to auto delete files after a certain age. The reason why I want this is because I'm setting the NAS as a backup source for my NVR IP camera system.

The NVR can auto FTP the footage to the NAS via FTP but it will be up to me to make sure there is enough room to accommodate the daily backups. I wasn't sure if there was any NAS that could do that. I was looking into the QNAP, Netgear or Synology series and tried the demos for both QNAP and Synology but there wasn't anything in there that I could see had the feature. Since I need abundant amount of storage (between 12 to 16TB), I was going to go for a unit that can do 5 or 6 hard drives.

The price isn't too much of a concern but more for the auto deletion feature that I need, since I won't have time to manually go through the file browser to delete the old footage. I rather have the NAS automatically delete a certain age and free up the space for me.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[stevech]

NASes and so on have FTP/SFTP and other file transfer methods, but that's all they do- transfer files. They don't know context and policy on how long a file in a given folder should be kept. auto-file-deletion seems to me isn't an FTP server function. It's more like a user forum, blog or a video surveillance archive app as exists in some NASes as below.

The video archiver in Synology (and probably QNAP and others as well) can be setup to constrain the archive size by deleting old files. You can read about that in the vendors' user manual.

The time backup capability in the afforementioned NASes will delete file cersions older than X weeks, but you probably want the video surveillance/archiving system meet your needs.

They synology I have is typical of such.. it takes an IP video stream from an IP camera (not via FTP), or a single-frame still shot every x seconds, or a stream/frame when motion is detected, etc., and archives. The size of the archive is your choice. Most cameras I've seen can be an FTP client and send that way, but its not common, vs. the taking the camera's native format. The NASes have to support a lot of proprietary camera formats.... and they do, as they sell to small business and so on that have multi-camera surveillance systems with forensics and so on.

[n0fx]

Originally Posted by stevech

NASes and so on have FTP/SFTP and other file transfer methods, but that's all they do- transfer files. They don't know context and policy on how long a file in a given folder should be kept. auto-file-deletion seems to me isn't an FTP server function. It's more like a user forum, blog or a video surveillance archive app as exists in some NASes as below.

The video archiver in Synology (and probably QNAP and others as well) can be setup to constrain the archive size by deleting old files. You can read about that in the vendors' user manual.

The time backup capability in the afforementioned NASes will delete file cersions older than X weeks, but you probably want the video surveillance/archiving system meet your needs.

They synology I have is typical of such.. it takes an IP video stream from an IP camera (not via FTP), or a single-frame still shot every x seconds, or a stream/frame when motion is detected, etc., and archives. The size of the archive is your choice. Most cameras I've seen can be an FTP client and send that way, but its not common, vs. the taking the camera's native format. The NASes have to support a lot of proprietary camera formats.... and they do, as they sell to small business and so on that have multi-camera surveillance systems with forensics and so on.

Thanks for the input. I already have a NVR that consolidates all my IP video streams, so I don't really need one that does IP recording but it does bring a good point. I might be able to pull another copy of the the secondary stream and record directly into the NAS as well, making a duplicate copy or I can just tell the IP camera to FTP the data into the NAS as well. I'll have to check with the vendor for compability with my cameras. I'm using a mix of two brands, so it might be challenging, since of the brands is more exclusive.

I found that I can run a cron job with the Synology and I'm pretty familiar with it, since I've used it before for someone else. I'll just run a script to delete a certain aged file from the hard drive every night.