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# Storage Areas

The video ingested by VMS is recorded to storage areas on disk. Each storage area is associated with one input, so you must configure a storage area for each of your cameras. VMS supports a maximum of 16 cameras.

VMS storage areas are rolling buffers. In a rolling buffer the oldest content is overwritten by the latest, so that the buffer has a constant size in terms of disk space. The time duration for which video is stored is not constant; this can change due to factors such as the video bitrate.

There are two properties that you must configure for each storage area. The first is the location of the storage area on disk. The second is the size of the storage area, in megabytes. The greater the size of a storage area, the longer video is stored before being overwritten.

IMPORTANT:

You cannot change the size of a storage area after it has been created. Consider the size of each storage area carefully.

To calculate the size of a storage area, multiply the video bitrate by the amount of time for which you want to store video. For example, if a camera supplies video at a constant bitrate of 1MB/sec, and you want to store video for 2 days, the storage area should be approximately 1 x (60 x 60 x 24) x 2 = 172,800MB. Cameras can supply video at a variable bitrate, in which case Micro Focus recommends that you create a storage area large enough for testing and use the graphical user interface to monitor the amount of video that is stored.

Storage areas are configured in the VMS configuration file. In the `[StorageAreas]` section, the parameter StorageArea specifies the number of storage areas to create, and a name for each. The parameter BaseFilePath specifies the location of the storage areas on disk and SizeInMB specifies the size. For example, the following configuration creates 16 storage areas, of 20,000MB each, in the path `D:\VideoStorage\`. When you use the parameter BaseFilePath each storage area is stored in a subfolder that matches the storage area name, for example `D:\VideoStorage\area0`, `D:\VideoStorage\area1`, and so on.

    [StorageAreas]
    StorageArea0=area0
    StorageArea1=area1
    StorageArea2=area2
    ...
    StorageArea15=area15
    BaseFilePath=D:\VideoStorage
    SizeInMB=20000

If necessary, you can override the default location and size by setting the FilePath and SizeInMB parameters in a configuration section that matches the storage area name. For example, to double the size of the first two storage areas and store them in folders in `E:\MoreStorage` you could use the following configuration.

    [StorageAreas]
    StorageArea0=area0
    StorageArea1=area1
    StorageArea2=area2
    ...
    StorageArea15=area15
    FilePath=D:\VideoStorage
    SizeInMB=20000

    [area0]
    SizeInMB=40000
    FilePath=E:\MoreStorage\area0

    [area1]
    SizeInMB=40000
    FilePath=E:\MoreStorage\area1

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