How to rename a camera without losing footage/events

[leccelecce]

I don't believe there is any official support for this currently.

Looks like a script would be required to:

• stop Frigate (to avoid clashes with background processes that touch cameras/recordings in the background)
• backup the sqlite DB
• edit the sqlite DB to rename the camera in all the tables where it's referenced
• -- this involves both updating the 'camera' field and the 'path' field
• walk the filesystem and rename the camera-named folders
• update the camera name in the config
• restart Frigate

I've not considered any downstream integrations e.g. HASS.

Anyone attempted this already?

[edit] Some SQL queries, accurate as of 0.13.0-rc1

sqlite> update recordings set path=replace(path,'camera2','garden') where path like '%camera2%';
sqlite> update recordings set camera='garden' where camera = 'camera2';
sqlite> update event set camera='garden' where camera = 'camera2';
sqlite> update timeline set camera='garden' where camera = 'camera2';
sqlite> update regions set camera='garden' where camera = 'camera2';

[NickM-27]

yeah that pretty much covers it on the frigate side

[leccelecce]

So it turns out I missed something. You can't just rename the 'camera' column on the tables - there is a field called 'path' on the recordings table that also needs to be updated.

[maples3]

I tried doing this myself today, and you can't just update the paths without updating the locations on disk too. I ended up getting things mixed up to the point where no old recordings would work, and revering the database wasn't an option because I moved the files on disk. Fortunately I'm still experimenting with getting things set up, and 99% of the important settings are stored in the config.yaml file, so I just backed up my config.yaml, nuked the /config and /media directories, and started over.

If I were to do this again, I would try updating only the database, not move any directories on-disk. I wouldn't touch any path columns (since I assume Frigate uses the stored path in the database instead of re-constructing it based on the camera name?), and see if that works.

Also, as of 0.15, there are 2 more tables that have a camera column: reviewsegment and previews