Adjust Reserved Disk Space
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Affected Roles: Owner, Administrator
Related Digital Watchdog VMS Apps: DW Spectrum IPVMS
Last Edit: August 13, 2024
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What is Reserved Disk Space?
By default, DW Spectrum will reserve free space within each local disk and NAS drive for storing video recordings and data from the cameras connected to the DW Spectrum Server.
To ensure that the DW Spectrum Server can archive camera video at any given time, DW Spectrum will overwrite the oldest footage in the archive with new data when the available Free Space of the disk drops below the Reserved Space setting that is assigned for the media storage.
This article will outline how to adjust the Reserved Space setting for a DW Spectrum Server in the Web Admin interface.
Default Reserved Space Size
- v2.6 and earlier: 5 GB for each local drive, 50 GB for each NAS on a DW Spectrum Server.
- v3.0, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1 and up: 10 – 30 GB for each local drive, 50 – 100 GB at each NAS on a DW Spectrum Server.
**NOTE: Reserved Space should be set to no greater than 10% of a drive’s total size.
Defining Archives, Storage Drives, and Reserved Space
Video streams from cameras are always recorded to their connected Server.
The recorded video is referred to as an “Archive”. Archives are typically divided between the multiple hard drives (referred to as Storage Drives) to improve reliability and to share the workload between HDDs.
By default, the Server is not able to use all the free space of a storage drive at first and is initially limited to only use a small portion of available space (typically 5 GB) to write the archive.
This space is referred to as “Reserved Space”.
The archive files can share space with the operating system and other various files found on storage drives, so there needs to be a specified amount of reserved space designated on each drive for the Server to use to avoid the Server dominating the storage space of the hosting computer.
Using the Server's Web Admin, you can increase the reserved space for the archives to increase the overall storage capacity for footage and archive retention time.
Changing the Reserved Space
Some reasons that users may want to change the size of the reserved space include the need to keep more storage space available and longer footage retention periods.
Using the DW Spectrum Web Admin, this can be configured via the following steps:
- Use a web browser (Chrome, Opera, or Safari is recommended) to connect with the Server Webpage.
Enter the URL (TCP/IP address) for the Server and connect with the Server. If this is being performed on the computer that is hosting the DW Spectrum Server, you can use “127.0.0.1:7001” to connect.
For example:
http://127.0.0.1:7001
**NOTE: The default port value for DW Spectrum IPVMS is 7001.
- Log in to the DW Spectrum Server as the Owner role (“admin”).
- In the Settings tab, click on “Servers” and select the Server that is being adjusted.
- The CloudID will populate in the URL line of the browser.
To access the Advanced Server Settings in the Web Admin, add “?advanced=” to the end of the URL address, then press ENTER.
The Storage Locations section of the menu will then display. Adjust the Reserved Space values as needed.
**NOTE: The greater that the Reserved Space setting is set to, the more of the storage drive’s Free Space can be used by DW Spectrum before old archive footage begins to be overwritten.
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Rev: 06/25 Copyright © DW. All rights reserved. Specifications and pricing subject to change without notice. 
