Tiger Surveillance

Installing Tiger Surveillance Bridge

1. Visit https://license.tiger-technology.com and log in to your account
2. Click "Current Version" under the Download section on the left and click to download the Surveillance Bridge that is appropriate for your system
3. Install the Surveillance Bridge on the Windows based Apex recorder you are wanting to back up by running the installer and following the prompts as directed. On the "Please select VMS Profile" page choose "Other..."
4. Once installation is complete, open the Surveillance Bridge application and log in with your Tiger Surveillance credentials

Configuring Tiger Surveillance Bridge to back up all cameras

1. In the Surveillance Bridge, click Surveillance Bridge then click Add Source
   
2. Use the File Explorer to navigate to the Videostore folder located at the root of your recording volume and click Select Folder
   
3. Select your Surveillance Bridge Target and click Okay
   
4. Click the newly created source and enter the connection information for the target
   
5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for all desired recording volumes
   1. IMPORTANT NOTE: You should record the exact source name in a secure location. In order to import the video into a new recorder, or recover the video in the case of a failure, you MUST know the exact Source name. 
6. Click Storage Extension Settings and turn Storage Extension on, enable By Age and configure it to be no less than 10 minutes
   
7. Click Surveillance Bridge and then click Resume

Configuring Tiger Surveillance Bridge to back up individual cameras

1. In Apex, navigate to the Settings page then Cameras and select the camera that you would like to back up
2. In the URL bar, note the camera ID. 
   
3. In the Surveillance Bridge, click Surveillance Bridge then click Add Source
   
4. In the File Explorer, open the videostore folder and select the folder with the same name as the camera ID, then click Select Folder
   
5. Select your Surveillance Bridge Target and click Okay
   
6. Click the newly created source and enter the connection information for the target
   
7. If there are multiple recording volumes, then repeat steps 3 through 6 for each storage volume present. 
   1. IMPORTANT NOTE: You should record the exact source name in a secure location. In order to import the video into a new recorder, or recover the video in the case of a failure, you MUST know the exact Source name. 
8. If Surveillance Bridge is not already in a running state, click Surveillance Bridge and then click Resume

Verifying Replication Percentage and Status

As long as the Apex software is running Tiger will never replicate 100% of the files on the disk. Apex creates one video file per camera per hour, and since it is constantly writing to the files we do not want to back them up to the cloud until the file is finalized. As such there will always be files that are open and Tiger will not replicate to storage source. 

1. In the Surveillance Bridge application, select the Source. The percentage of files replicated will be shown next to Statistics
   

Viewing Video that has been backed up via Tiger Surveillance Bridge

In Apex, video that has been backed up via Tiger Surveillance Bridge is indistinguishable from video on the local disk. The video is shown in Search exactly as if the video was on the local disk, there are no additional steps needed to view it. 

Note that video that has been backed up to an external location, like the cloud, does need to be downloaded from the external location in order to be played. This is done seamlessly by the Tiger Surveillance Bridge software, but if you have limited bandwidth available for the download then it may take longer for the video to play than normal. 

Importing video into a new Apex recorder

To import the video into a new Apex recorder, or to the same recorder after a reimage, follow these steps:

1. Install the Tiger Surveillance Bridge as in the Installing Tiger Surveillance Bridge section
2. In Windows, create all of the folders that were chosen as the Sources when you configured Tiger Surveillance Bridge previously
   1. Example: If you previously backed up source D:\videostore\d52df813-e0ee-46fa-9232-b6c86a85b8ec, on the new system you must have a storage volume labeled D:, and you must create a folder labeled "videostore" and then create a folder labeled "d52df813-e0ee-46fa-9232-b6c86a85b8ec" in that folder.
3. In Tiger Surveillance Bridge, follow the the same steps as in the Configuring Tiger Surveillance Bridge to back up all cameras or Configuring Tiger Surveillance Bridge to backup individual cameras sections
4. Wait until Replication status percentage reaches 100%
5. Restart the recorder
6. After the restart completes, the cameras will appear in Apex as Orphaned Cameras. Follow the steps in guide Recovering Orphaned Cameras to recover them. 

Best Practices

1. Ensure that your internet upload speed is no less than 125% of the average amount of data being written to the disk at any given time. Refer to the System Design Tool for calculating your average throughput. 
   1. If you need to manually throttle the CPU or Bandwidth used by the Tiger Surveillance Bridge, contact Tiger Surveillance for assistance
2. Each source should have its own mount point or cloud bucket within your storage service
3. Ensure that there is enough local storage available for 2 to 3 days of recording in case of internet outages
4. You cannot have a source that is a sub-folder of an existing source. For example, you could not have a source of D:\Videostore and also D:\videostore\d52df813-e0ee-46fa-9232-b6c86a85b8ec
5. If you have a large number of cameras and folders that you need to back up, Tiger Surveillance may be able to assist with automating the processes listed above. Please contact them for assistance. 

Related Links

Recovering Orphaned Cameras

System Design Tool