Per camera storage rotation on low disk space

[azsde]

Hello,

When the storage is running low, older recodings are deleted to make room for the new one, and if I understand correctly, the current behavior is this :

• Two cameras A and B are set up
• Storage is full
• Camera A detects something and tries to record it, but the storage is full
• Frigate delete the older recordings on the system, even if they belong to camera B.
• Camera A now has enough space to record.

This behavior is a bit problematic for my usecase as some cameras aren't going to have the same amount of '' events '' as other ones, yet their older recordings might get deleted.

Is it possible to avoid having B cameras recording deleted and only delete older A camera recordings ?

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

You are correct about the current behavior: when storage runs low, Frigate deletes the oldest recordings system-wide, regardless of which camera they belong to. There is no built-in option to restrict deletion to only the oldest recordings from a specific camera. This means if camera A tries to record when storage is full, the oldest files—potentially from camera B—will be deleted to make space(1), (2).

There is also no configuration available to set a maximum storage limit per camera or to have per-camera storage rotation. You can manually tune the retention days for each camera to balance usage, but automatic per-camera disk management is not supported(2).

📚 Sources:

1. Recording
2. Restricting recording disk space with fair use between cameras

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[hawkeye217]

The AI is correct here. Frigate's emergency cleanup is not configurable. The recommendation is to configure your retention settings to avoid emergency cleanup altogether, or just increase the amount of storage available to Frigate.

[azsde]

Alright @hawkeye217 , thank you for letting me know.

From what I've seen, rotation happens around 90% of used disk space, I guess I'll have to come up with a python script that shall be able to implement a custom rotation behavior using the API.

[hawkeye217]

Frigate's emergency cleanup runs when there is less than an hour of recording space left, which is calculated by your camera bandwidth (which can be viewed in Storage Metrics in Settings).

A script of some kind to call the API and save off specific footage before that runs could work, but the easiest solution would be just to add more storage to support the full number of days you want to retain.

Let us know if there's anything else we can help with!