Database rebuild

Rebuilding database from the settings

In case of an disk failure or an power outage, Obseron database might get malformed. This usually appears as an system error "database is malformed" or as the recordings not playing correctly from the timeline.

There is an easy solution in the settings to rebuild the database, this will go through all existing recordings and create a complete database based on them.

Database rebuilding can be enabled from the recording the following way:

1. Open Settings > System page
2. Enable "Rebuild recording database on next restart"
3. Restart Obseron

After restarting, you can check the status of the rebuild from the same page. Depending on the storage size and the number of recordings, this may take a long time. However, the rebuild takes place in the background and does not affect recording or any usage. Recordings appear for viewing on the timeline as the database is created from them, in order from newest to oldest.

Using dbtool/obseron-dbdump

An Obseron database can get malformed in the case of a disk failure. dbtool (or dbdump on Linux) is included with every Obseron installation, and can be used to rebuild the database file from existing recordings. This page covers the usage of the tool.

The tool can be found from the installation directory on Windows systems and from the /usr/bin/ directory on Linux systems.

Before using the tool, the Obseron process must be terminated and the old database files (*.db* in database storage folder) removed. Obseron can be restarted after the rebuilding has started.

Usage: dbTool.exe <drive>=<sourceDir>[,<drive>=<sourceDir>][,...] <targetDir> [<beginTime> <endTime>]

Time format: "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM"

Case 1:

The recorder is equipped with 3 hard drives; 1 for the operating system (C:), 1 for a database (D:), 1 for recordings (E:). The hard drive for the database fails and is replaced.
Restoring all the recordings is required.

Generating a new database (to d:\capture) for all the recordings on drive E: (e:\capture), the command will go through all the recording files on the given folder and generate a database for them:

dbTool.exe e=e:\capture d:\capture

Case 2:

The recorder is equipped with 3 hard drives; 1 for the operating system (C:), 1 for the database (D:), 1 for recordings (E:). The hard drive for the database fails and is replaced.
To save time on rebuilding, only the past month of recordings is restored. The current date in this example is 1st Feb 2017 10:10.

dbTool.exe e=e:\capture d:\capture "2017-01-01 10:10" "2017-02-01 10:10"

Case 3:

The recorder is equipped with 4 hard drives; 1 for the operating system (C:), 1 for the database (D:), 2 for recordings (E: and F:). The hard drive for the database fails and is replaced.
To save time on rebuilding, only the past month of recordings is restored. This month's recordings reside both on E: and F: drives. The current date in this example is 1st Feb 2017 10:10.

dbtool.exe e=e:\capture,f=f:\capture d:\capture "2017-01-01 10:10" "2017-02-01 10:10"

Case 4:

There are some .tt recording files on a usb stick (D:\), which should be converted to a backup that can be opened for viewing with Obseron.

Create a base folder "mybackup". Create a new folder "a" inside this base folder. Move the .tt files to the new "a" folder to represent a capture drive:

mkdir d:\mybackup

mkdir d:\mybackup\a

move d:\*.tt d:\mybackup\a\

Now generate a database:

dbtool.exe a=d:\mybackup\a d:\mybackup

Generating the database will take some time, depending on the number of recording files.