Maintenance / NVR health

How to Check NVR Recording Health

Live view proves a camera can stream now. It does not prove the recorder stored yesterday’s footage, retained the expected history or can export evidence.

Best maintenance test: pick a recent known event on every critical channel and actually play it back from storage.

What to verify

Disk status: the drive is detected, healthy and not reporting SMART/bad-sector or abnormal-status warnings.
Per-channel recording: each required camera is configured for the intended continuous/event schedule.
Playback: retrieve footage from several hours or days ago, not just the last minute.
Retention: confirm the oldest available recording roughly matches the planned history.
Time: verify camera/NVR timestamps and timezone are correct.
Export: periodically export a short clip and confirm it opens on another device.

Automate what the platform supports

Enable storage exceptions, camera-offline alerts and disk-health notifications where available. Alerts reduce detection delay, but they do not replace sampled playback because configuration or schedule errors can exist while the hardware reports healthy.

Investigate gaps immediately

If a channel is missing recordings, determine whether the failure is camera connectivity, recording schedule, recorder throughput, storage capacity or disk health before changing settings broadly.