Step-by-step guide for setting up Surveillance Bridge for cloud-enabled Disaster Recovery
Introduction
Storing and managing a significant amount of recordings on your servers could sometimes take a toll on your machine. Faults and errors may occur, or circumstances completely out of your control, like power and network outages. In any case, live streams and recordings are always at risk of being permanently lost. You could experience a disaster you may not be able to recover from unless you equip yourself with a bullet-proof solution.
The Surveillance Bridge Approach
Supporting a host of field-proven video management systems, Surveillance Bridge is the only software-only data management solution that works with both live streams and recordings. It automatically moves less accessed recordings from local storage to affordable cloud storage tiers.
This way, you are always protected from unexpected events and scenarios which could result in partial or total wipe-out of your data.
Why Surveillance Bridge?
Surveillance Bridge by Tiger Surveillance is easy-to-deploy data management software that supports over 20 video management systems (VMS), some of them with a plug-in to the VMS interface, others with a separate application.
Installing and using the software allows you to access cloud data directly and to continue to use your VMS as usual.
The Surveillance Bridge plug-in is tightly integrated with the interface of XProtect by Milestone, MOBOTIX HUB by MOBOTIX, Siveillance by Siemens, and Velocity Vision by Identiv. This means you can manage your data directly from your VMS.
For other supported video management systems (full list available here), you can use the standard Surveillance Bridge as a separate application.
Surveillance Bridge also provides the fastest possible recovery in the event of a disaster. All video and metadata needed by the VMS can immediately be made available using just a few clicks. Check out our YouTube channel for more information.
For the purposes of this guide, we have broken down the Surveillance Bridge Disaster Recovery set-up and usage process into three separate steps:
- Installation
- Disaster Recovery Setup
- Monitor Recovery Progress
Installation
Before you begin, you will need to download the Surveillance Bridge installer. For more information, please visit the Surveillance Bridge product page. Follow the respective guided wizard to set up Surveillance Bridge. Its installation will not interfere with your ongoing recordings and does not require any downtime.
Depending on the video management system you are using, you will be able to work either with the standard Surveillance Bridge standalone interface or with the Surveillance Bridge plug-in, integrated with your VMS. See the different sections below.
Disaster Recovery Setup
Depending on the video management system that you are using, check one of the following sections of the guide. If you are working with one of the video management systems supported with a tight integration with Surveillance Bridge, then you can take advantage of managing Disaster Recovery directly from within your VMS. In the case of any other supported video management system with no tight integration to your VMS, access the interface of the standard Surveillance Bridge to enable Disaster Recovery.
You can find a comprehensive list of supported VMS providers here.
Standard Surveillance Bridge
To configure Surveillance Bridge for Disaster Recovery, follow the next few steps:
- Start the Surveillance Bridge product by double-clicking its Desktop icon or finding it in the Start menu.
- Click the Add source button at the bottom left corner to start configuring your environment.
- Browse to the desired folder. That would be the location of your VMS storage.
- Select the desired cloud or on-premises storage target and click OK.
- Set up the target with all its required details and click Apply to save your configuration.
- Take no action – nothing will be imported from the target
- Enable Disaster Recovery light – only metadata will be imported initially, the rest will only be downloaded on demand
- Enable Disaster Recovery full – both metadata and content will be restored.
You will be asked to choose an action to be performed on any existing data in the target:
-
The target that has been set up should look similar to this:
- Go to the Disaster Recovery Policy section and toggle the on/off switch, then click Apply.
- Up until that point Surveillance Bridge was in a paused state waiting for your configuration changes. You can now start its work by clicking the Resume. You can further Pause and Resume the work of Surveillance Bridge as needed.
Surveillance Bridge Plug-in
Once you have the plug-in installed, it’s time to set it up for work. Everything can be configured much more easily within your VMS graphical user interface, and you get some additional benefits.
- In the Navigation pane of the VMS Management Client, click Disaster Recovery.
- In the right pane under Recording servers, click the recording server whose recording storage or archive you want to back up.
NOTE:
If a recording server is displayed in the list with a greyed-out icon, it is either offline or does not have Surveillance Bridge installed.
The Surveillance Bridge plug-in lists all recording storage/archives configured for the selected recording server.
- Next to the recording storage
or the archive 
pane, click Enable.
NOTE:
If immediate/archive tier extension is already enabled for the selected recording storage/archive, the same storage will be used for Disaster Recovery. - In the Storage Target dialog, select whether you are adding Public Cloud or On-premises storage as Disaster Recovery storage and then select the type of disaster recovery storage.
- Click Next and provide the requested configuration details for the selected Disaster Recovery storage, then click OK. You can get the requested secret key from your cloud portal.
Never provide the credentials of your root user.
If the account you specified for access to the Disaster Recovery storage cannot list all buckets/containers, you must enter the name of the bucket/container manually.
- At the top of the recording storage
or the archive 
pane, switch to Running 
and when prompted, confirm that you want to start automatic Surveillance Bridge operations.
Your data is now being replicated to the cloud for secure backup purposes.
Monitor Replication
There are a couple of indicators you can observe to see how much of your recordings have been successfully replicated and at what speed this happens. Surveillance Bridge keeps continuous track of live-generated data, so the process will never reach one hundred percent.
Since each live session produces a new file, the stronger your internet connection, the more likely for replication to comfortably go beyond 95%. If you stop recording, the process should eventually complete, and all of your data will be safe.
To get information on how much of your data has already been replicated and is now protected by your target storage, click on your source and check the percentage at the bottom right corner. It will initially be 0 and you can monitor its progress until it reaches (close to) 100.
With the Standard Surveillance Bridge, it looks like this:
For even more detailed information, you can use the Statistics button, which will show you data on how many files have been unprocessed for any reason, excluded, modified, pending, replicated or failed, together with information on how much space the files occupy on the local source.
With the Surveillance Bridge plug-in, we have different colors showing up:
You can view the total size of camera data, which needs to be backed up in the header of a recording storage/archive and keep track of the percentage of already backed up data in the progress bar below.
all data from recording storage/archive has been fully backed up
data from the recording storage/archive is being backed up
If cameras are actively recording on the recording storage and data is being constantly sent to the archive, the percentage of backed up data may never reach 100%.
Surveillance Bridge failed to back up some data from the recording storage/archive. To identify the exact files, check the logs in Windows Event Viewer.
The integration of the plug-in with the Smart/Video client of the VMS can also give you information on replicated files. When you need to access and view recordings that are already replicated, you can use the Smart Client to see a colored timeline telling you which pieces of the timeline are locally available and which ones have already been replicated to the cloud.
The Playback tab offers you a “map” of the colors, where you can see what each of them means.
It gives you the following information:
the recording is accessible directly from the recording storage or the archive.
the recording is accessible directly from the recording storage or the archive and is already replicated to the target storage.
the recording is accessible only from the immediate tier of the recording storage or the archive. Reviewing the recording depends on the setting for automatic and/or manual retrieval of data from the extension.
the recording is accessible only from the archive tier extension of the recording storage or the archive. Reviewing the recording depends on the setting for automatic and/or manual retrieval of data from the extension.
Disaster Recovery Process
In case of a disaster, you need to recover your data from the target storage (cloud/on premises).
Standard Surveillance Bridge
In an event of a failure, you would need to set up Surveillance Bridge on a new server or configure a new source drive/folder on the same server. Then configure it exactly the same as you originally did (follow the steps in the Disaster Recovery Setup section), meaning you need to point it to the same target storage. Just make sure to select Disaster Recovery light or Disaster Recovery full, when presented with that option. This way, you will get back all the recordings from the cloud or the on-premises location used for an off-site copy of your data.
Your data is stored in a non-proprietary format in any cloud or on-premises storage, which means that in the event of a failure, you can quickly access it even directly from that storage target until you are ready with your new Surveillance Bridge configuration.
Surveillance Bridge Plug-in
You can diagnose a recording storage/archive failure in the Disaster Recovery page of the Management Client:
- a recording server whose recording storage and/or archive has failed is displayed in the page with a red blinking icon
- a failed recording storage or archive is displayed in the list with a warning sign
- the Disaster Recovery Wizard button is available in the recording server pane
You can also recover backed up data from a failed recording server by doing the following:
- diagnose a failed recording server – a failed recording server is displayed in the Disaster Recovery page of the Management Client with a greyed-out icon
in the list and the Disaster Recovery Wizard button is displayed below the list of servers. - prepare the replacement server
- recover the recording server and its recording storage/archives with the Disaster Recovery Wizard
With the Disaster Recovery Wizard, you can recover both failed storage and an entire failed server. The wizard will tell you what is required and guide you through the process. At the end, you will have the proper backed up configuration again.
Conclusion
By configuring Surveillance Bridge for Disaster Recovery, you ensure that your data is always kept safe, and no unexpected event will wipe it out. A little extra insurance keeps you one step ahead of losing mission-critical information and progress.
For video demonstration on Disaster Recovery with the Standard Surveillance Bridge, click here.
For video demonstration on Disaster Recovery with the Surveillance Bridge Plug-in, click here.
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About Tiger Surveillance
Tiger Surveillance is a software development company specializing in on-premises-first hybrid data management for video surveillance workflows. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, the company is powered by Tiger Technology, an established technology provider of storage, data, user, and media management solutions.
The Tiger Surveillance portfolio includes solutions designed to extend and protect storage infrastructure on premises or in any cloud tier. The company’s flagship product Surveillance Bridge enables customers to adopt the cloud for unlimited capacity and disaster recovery thus optimizing costs & resources and extending retention times.
Find out more about Tiger Surveillance here. Catch up on our blog here.
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