Network Attached Storage (NAS)

Something like this ? :slightly_smiling_face:They might be working on something similar right now , who knows

I saw this some time ago. I was hoping WYZE was going to try to get it up and going again. Dumping all the camera feeds locally makes sense if you have an actual problem and you need to review the entire feeds and not snippets.

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Not sure why they simply canā€™t allow a local option - simply point to a local NAS drive folder as the storage device. If the folder or directory should have a specific name, thatā€™s easy enough. Setting up a username and password is easy enough. Maybe they just assume most people donā€™t know how to manage their existing NAS by setting up users, security, directories, etc. Just seems like an easy option they could offer via an alternate firmware.

Exactly. A local option would take care of ISP dropouts and allow immediate access to full video streams. It would complete the cams ability to be used as a security device. The need to be constantly connected to WYZE servers for motion detection is a grave concern.

E. Zyskowski II

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There is a firmware out there that enables the ability to save to an NFS mountā€¦ itā€™s not the RTSP firmware.
Iā€™ll see if I can find the point in the discussion and Iā€™ll link it here

EDIT:
found itā€¦ itā€™s actually in this thread . post 145

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@UserCustomerGwen Have you discussed the above with your team?
It seems like itā€™s simple enough and would satisfy a lot of people on this thread.

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The hack works to an extent and shows that itā€™s definitely possible to have video copied to a NAS automatically. I found it to be unreliable when I tried it, but if the copy operation were run asynchronously using something more robust like rsync (with error detection and retries) Iā€™m sure it would be a very solid solution.

I suspect this is the method the Wyze team planned to use for the MaxDrive, but Iā€™m just guessing based on what I saw of the Linux firmware.

Agree. Iā€™m only using 20% of my NAS capacity to backup all my files. I could dedicate easily another 20% just for my wyze camā€™s or more and have far more capacity than the sd card and have easy lan access locally or wan access remotely via my own personal cloud.

Basically the current wyze camā€™s are nanny cams or pet cams or whatever but not security cams. Due to its feature set enterprising people are finding ways to use it for security and for many it is enough or darn close to satisfying those needs. Connecting to a local NAS or local shared drive would go a long way to making it more security oriented.

What did you find unreliable about it?
Depending on the issues, it might still be worth it for me.

The current setup is a pain
ā€“if you want to retrieve info
ā€“find out you need to review the video but it happened longer than the time allowed due to the size of the SDcard
ā€“navigation of the video sucks since if you see motion, you then would need to manually go to the timeline at the timestamp you saw in the notification
ā€“if itā€™s outside and stolen, they also got your card . (i knowā€¦ i knowā€¦ this isnā€™t a security deviceā€¦ but it works fine for my use if I could get the video to my NAS)

I tested it briefly ā€œjust because I couldā€ so I wasnā€™t invested in making it work reliably. Itā€™s entirely possible that factors in my environment and storage were responsible and with a little tinkering it could be better.

  • What I saw in my several days of use was a general instability (failure to connect, timeouts, couldnā€™t view playback through the app) that made me feel uneasy about the reliability.
  • The way the video is copied to local storage doesnā€™t appear to have any verification or retry mechanism, so I would never know if I was missing video.
  • The method of writing files to the firmware is also a bit ā€œhackyā€ and definitely seems like a security hole ( though itā€™s a local exploit only so itā€™s not a concern for most people) so I wasnā€™t thrilled about having to run old firmware (if Wyze patches it) or re-apply the hack every time a firmware upgrade is released.

All things considered I just decided it wasnā€™t worth the effort. I like my Wyze Cams and Iā€™m okay with 64GB or 128GB SD cards. Most of my cams are indoors so theft is not a concern, and accessing the SD card (while annoying) is not hard to do if I need it.

As I mentioned if Wyze could simply enable this feature in the firmware and use something that verifies the file copy (and run it as a periodic upload rather than real-time file writes) I would be on board.

This is something that Iā€™ve been bringing up with the team. I donā€™t think weā€™ve settled on a direction yet.

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Exactly! Partnerships are cumbersome and Wyze seems to NAIL product/software unison dev. Amazon has this for $20, Just insert your own formatted drive! Amazon.com

Cheers!

Not meaning to be negative but these USB enclosures arenā€™t a NAS - a NAS is basically a similar looking box but has an Ethernet port to connect to your network, generally one of the ports on your router. It has a tiny computer on board that runs its firmware that allows you to login, set it up and manage it. You normally setup yourself as the admin with complete control, and then can setup specific users with specific logins and limited access, create folders, sub folders, etc. plus it can be setup for remote access from outside your local network. Some NAS come with a hard drive or multiple drives, some allow you to install your own. You can map the folders you create on the NAS to drive letters on your computers for ease of use. There are other benefits too such as setting up multiple drives as a RAID array.

The usb drive enclosure basically allows you to add an external hard drive to a computer - it behaves exactly like an internal drive, your computer will assign it a drive letter such as usb_drive G: The only benefit is you can move it from computer to computer. You can share drives on a computer with other computers on your network but itā€™s really, really, really a bad idea to make your computer available outside your local network, although apps like teamviewer can provide secure access. At least a NAS can be setup for secure remote access without any special software so you basically can have your own private cloud.

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Keep in mind many/most routers allow you to setup a USB drive attached directly to the USB port on your router as a NAS. In essence the router handles the setup and NAS functions and the USB drive just acts as a drive.

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Donā€™t think thatā€™s what they meant. fwiw, my router is old and the usb drive access was poor internally and worse remotely and they never really fixed the firmware - itā€™s basically abandoned now, so I just use it as a separate subnet internally. I see a USB port on the att router - will have to check it out. Although my NAS has a USB port that does work well but I donā€™t really need extra capacity so donā€™t use it.

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Oh I know itā€™s not what they meant, but before anyone wrote ā€œjustā€ a USB drive off I wanted to remind folks of the option. Each router is of course different so what works for one may not work well for another.

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I use my NAS mostly for storing all different kinds files I need to save.
My USB drive is attached to USB 3.0 port on the router It shows up as a network drive , I use it mostly for storing music and movies ,
The movies I stream right to PC and TV

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I have 2 4 TB NAS Drives that sit standalone on my Network. One contains my movie collection which I access via Plex. It also hosts my pictures and music collections. The other drive is two years newer and is a backup of the first.

I have two USB drives attached to the USB ports of two routers. One hosts a 4 TB drive I use to backup my Windows computer and Server. The other has a 3 TB drive I back my MAC and Linux computers up to.

Every year I buy a new 4 TB or greater drive and replace the oldest of the 4 drives with the new one. The old one is reformatted after a month and then I use a junk drill bit in a drill press to ā€œventilateā€ the drives either SSD or spinning platters :grin::grin::grin:

I also have a spare NAS drive and one spare USB drive as offline spares. These get rotated in and replaced every other year.

I use a lot of virtual machines for working from and testing stuff so I donā€™t have a high machine count. And lately I have been primarily using hosted cloud based VMā€™s which has been wonderful!

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Nice setup @rbruceporter

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Synology DS411 with latest OS.
RTSP works fine

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