Video Surveillance with Synology NAS

I was fed ye olde Surveillance Station video by Youtube this morning and that is a hot project for me. I have a hobby homestead with several acres and poultry, a dog 2 feral cats, a 3 (was 6) feral guinea fowl. About 2 acres are fronting the roadwith an auto gate. I need 6 to 8 cameras within Cat 7 distance of the hub.

I am noob-ish with linux and all the distros, and the first thing I notice is that the Synology NAS have these file system types

File system • Internal: Btrfs, ext4
• External: Btrfs, ext4, ext3, FAT32, NTFS, HFS+, exFAT3

Is Btrfs anything to be concerned about? I see that it is pretty standard for some distos. I will have a Winows/Nix network growing in my house.

I am hacked that prices for everything are now at least double compared to Nov 21, 2019 when Wendell went over a Synology system.

So I need input on whether to go with a 10Gb NAS from Synology with Surveillance Station or whatgood alternatives there are.

What kind of drive configuration were you looking at?

I’ve heard btrfs is fine on single drives (so is ext4) but for raid, then use the mdadm to set up an array, and then btrfs on top, rather than using btrfs’s raid options

I am looking at 4-6 drives. With it being Synology I am sure they have requirements for how to set up raid. I am asking about more generally as part of a LAN featuring Linux and Windows boxes.

“features a Btrfs file system optimized by Synology to offer
you high reliability and high performance. Btrfs supports advanced
storage technologies that meet the needs of modern business:
• Advanced snapshot technology provides schedulable and
near-instantaneous data protection of shared folders and LUNs.
• File and folder level data restoration offers users who wish to
restore only a specific file or folder more flexibility.
• Flexible Shared Folders and User Quota System provide
comprehensive quota control on all user accounts and shared folders.
• File self-healing allows Btrfs file systems to auto-detect corrupted
files using mirrored metadata and to recover broken data using RAID
configurations.
• Inline compression compresses data before writing them to the drive,
to optimize storage use and reduce write commands to the drives”

Raid 1 and Raid 10 on BTRFS is solid. I’ve heard people complain about Raid5 being particularly problematic.

I think if you want to add disks in the future, a ZFS might be better.

Does Synology support zfs?

I’m not sure how they do the raid in the back end.

had a quick look on their website, but still unsure.

Either should not affect it’s ability to serve data over the Lan, afaik.

Unless you are looking to completely back up the pool over the lan, then the occasional checking a vid is probably little different? if anything, the btrfs would probably be petter performance, as long as data loss not a problem when there is a powercut (like if home being invaded and power might be cut?)

I am discovering more Synology videos by Level1 on Youtube so I need to get caught up on the “common knowledge” of these NASs

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Note, if you want to use Synologies for security cameras you should make sure you are comfortable with the pricing/licensing.

Here is the licensing for Surveillance Station:

License for first 2 cameras is free
Licensing is not for a particular registered camera but for any added camera
Licensing is one-time, not yearly etc.
Licensing is transferrable to other Surveillance Station hosts

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Did you look at the cost for each additional license? It is $60 per camera so in your situation you will me looking at about $360 in licensing fees + the cost of the NAS itself + HDD’s. I think that you would be better served with just using a Dell optiplex running Blue Iris and a few used HDD’s off of eBay. It would be much cheaper and better expansion options down the road.

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Blue Iris is $60 per year and only runs on Windows. I am looking at the current state of Blue Iris to see if it will meet my needs.

I am ultimately looking for a powerful, no-cloud, open standards scenario where I have a NAS with plenty of power and storage as my nvr.

I don’t want to overcomplicate and overprice things, but I also don’t want to regret getting a system that does not meet my needs and becomes obsolete/outdated. Got to find a good balance.

Blue Iris is a one time cost. You pay annually for support and updates. In my research there isn’t a FOSS solution that can match the feature set and ease of use Blue Iris has. There are plenty of people that have tried making FOSS solutions work and eventually just gave up and switched to BI. Not to say you shouldn’t explore and experiment if you want but if you are looking for a push button solution BI is hard to beat.

Synology isn’t FOSS or open at all either and locks you into a hardware ecosystem. While BI is a Windows only software it is portable to any x86 system. If you are resource conscientious you could try running a headless Win Server and access BI from the web GUI.