I have a Monitoring system from a company called Q-SEE that I purchased a couple years ago from Costco.com. It has a DVR that holds 2.5 terabites of data on 7 hard drives and controls 16 cameras on my property (1 acre). It is connected to the internet and reboots itself automatically if the power goes out. I have a whole house generator (runs on natural gas) that kicks on after being out of power for 30 seconds so all the cameras and DVR come right back on including the black box that brings the internet into the house. The DVR reboots in less than 20 seconds after a power failure and goes back to where it was unlike some computers that have cameras attached to them.
I am not a fan of the computer run surveillance systems because if you do loose power, the computer will shut down unless you have a battery backup that will eventually shut down the computer anyway.
I have the commercial DVR setup ($2800). I can pickup every camera on my windows based internet Cell phone (live) anywhere I get cellphone/internet data service. I can tether my cell phone to my lap top to get internet most anywhere too ($20/month). The DVR sends me text messages when something happens within certain parameters and I can set up each camera to start recording based upon certain pixels on the screen having movement, time of day and length of recording. This set up feature can be accessed from any computer so you can tell the DVR to start recording if it senses any movement within a little box that you can draw on each camera screen.
I have one camera that will start recording if something moves in front of the gate key pad at my entrance gate even though the camera is 20 feet way. That way I am not recording the every time a bird or shadow that passes within the shot of the camera and it will go back and pickup 5 seconds before the movement was detected. Motion sensing technology is a great way to save disk space storage and get alot of recording time on the DVR. It is still a pain when it is snowing or raining at night because it will keep recording all the time unless I tell certain cameras only to sense motion at certain times of the day or week.
If I had all 16 cameras recording all the time at the highest definition possible (movie camera quality, 32 frames a second) I would get about 1 month of recording time with 2.5 tera bites of hard drives. The DVR has the capacity to handle 16 cameras at one time due to technology built into the DVR and the high quality of the hard-drives that are being used. If I set the cameras to record a screen shot every 1/4 second (instead of 32 times a second, movie quality) then I would get almost a year of data retrival before it starts recording over itself.
Some cameras will case others to start recording also (linked by the DVR setup). If my security system detects movement in the house, door or window then other cameras are triggered to start recording. So the system can plug into any security system that has electronic triggers.
If someone wants in the main gate, the keypad is programed to call me remotely and I can pickup the camera on my cell phone at the same time to see who is at the gate or front door. I can press a number on my cell phone to open the gate.
I have used the recordings to tell deliver drivers where to put packages while I am gone (precious to see the look on their face when they know figure out that they are being watched), get my driveway repaired when the US postal worker drove in my cleared driveway with snow cables on his truck and and tore the driveway surface up (video was great showing that the driver was ignorant of the conditions), replacing garbage cans that were inadvertently dumped in the garbage truck by mechanical arms and driver drove off without retrieving them, I have had 5 garbage cans go missing that way and everyone replaced by the garbage company because I had the date stamped video of it happening.
You can tell it to go back and start recording 5 seconds before something moves on the screen because it has a buffered memory. It can down download screen shots and video on any remote computer anywhere in the world and with the amount of hard-drive disk space (replaceable with same hard-drive as in a normal computer) I can keep recordings for about 5 to 12 months (depending upon recording setup) before the DVR starts recording over the oldest video.
Most of my cameras are outdoors facing at the sides of the house, doors and driveway. I have two facing down each way of the main parkway where I live. I have supplied the police with records when something went down on the parkway and they have caught criminals with the recordings. Great block watch item.
One of my neighbors was broken into and the crook with a driver got out of his car at the top of my driveway and walked right by one of my cameras, got a crow bar out of his trunk and walked 5 properties down the street and broke into the their house with the crow bar to a sliding door. I found out about the break-in a month later through another neighbor. The police had no leads until I went back into my recordings and found the video of the guy. I even found two weeks earlier that the same guy and his accomplice had parked in my driveway and walked down our driveway and others to case the neighbor hood. He was caught two months later in another break-in in another town and they used my video to convict him and his girl friend of my neighbors break-in on a seperate charge.
I am not a computer guy but I set the whole system up myself and I keep adding to it as I read more of the manual to see what it capable of doing.
Other than that, I know when my children are coming and going and who's neighbors dog unloaded on my lawn, that usually ends with free a beer
Dallas
