¶ Working with the archive
The archive is where you watch the recordings that have arrived from your recorder: you pick a day, see on a timeline what happened at what time and which camera saw it, play a clip, download it or send it to somebody as a link. This page walks you through all of that, step by step.
¶ How to open the archive
- Sign in at cvr.webdisk.io and go to the panel.
- Find the tile of the recorder whose footage you want to watch.
- Click Archive. The recordings view opens underneath the tile.
You always view the archive for one recorder. If you have several, you switch between them by clicking Archive on the next tile. Use Close to shut the view.
💡 If you see the message "Nothing in the index yet", no recording has reached the archive so far. We scan your storage every 10 minutes, so a recording that has just arrived from the recorder may take a moment to appear in the list.
¶ The calendar — which day has recordings
Right at the top of the archive there is a strip of fourteen squares. Each square is one day, labelled with the day and month (for example 02.09). The most recent day sits on the right.
The colour of a square tells you how much footage arrived that day — the darker and duller it is, the less; the brighter the blue, the more. This is not a "good/bad" score, just a quick way to spot an unusual day: a suddenly darker square in the middle of the week usually means a camera stopped recording for part of the day.
| How the square looks | What it means |
|---|---|
| Dimmed, cannot be clicked | Not a single recording that day |
| Dark blue | Little footage for this recorder |
| Progressively brighter blue (four shades) | Progressively more footage |
| With a blue outline | The day you are currently viewing |
Hover over a square and you will see the exact numbers: the date, the number of recordings and their total size. Clicking a square opens that day below.
The strip shows two continuous weeks, empty days included. That is deliberate: a gap in recording is information, and a list of only the days with footage would hide it from you.
¶ How to reach further back than two weeks
Next to the strip there is a Pick a date field. Type a date into it (or choose one in the calendar) and the strip shifts so that this date becomes the last, right-hand square — giving you the two weeks before it. If the chosen day has recordings, it opens straight away below; if it is empty, the strip still shifts and you pick a square from it that has something in it.
The archive always opens on the most recent day with footage — because most of the time you come to look at what has just happened.
¶ The day timeline — what happened and when
Below the calendar is the timeline for the chosen day: from 00 on the left to 24 on the right, marked every three hours.
Each camera has its own lane — a horizontal band labelled with the camera's name on the left. That way you can see at once whether an event was caught by one camera or by two at the same time. Camera names come from whatever your recorder calls them; CVR does not change them.
On a lane, every recording is a coloured rectangle standing at its own time. The width matches the length of the recording, except that very short clips are drawn a little wider so you can hit them with the cursor.
¶ What the clip colours mean
| Colour | What the recorder detected |
|---|---|
| Blue | Motion — an event with no recognised type |
| Orange | A person |
| Green | A vehicle |
⚠️ This is information from your recorder, not our analysis of the picture. CVR never watches your footage: it does not recognise faces, count people or detect behaviour. We take only what the recorder itself wrote into the file name and turn it into a colour. A camera that does not tell event types apart will give you nothing but blue rectangles — and that is normal.
Hover over a rectangle and you will see the time, length and size of the recording. Clicking it plays the recording.
Faded rectangles that cannot be clicked are footage your browser will not play (for example stills from cameras that send single frames, or proprietary NVR formats). You can still download that footage from the list below the timeline.
⚠️ If a red message appears under the timeline saying "This day has more recordings than we can show at once", the day was exceptionally busy and the timeline is incomplete. Narrow your search: go back to the calendar, pick a neighbouring day, or look for the event by time in the list of recordings.
¶ Playback
Click a rectangle on the timeline or the Play button in a row of the recordings list. A player appears above the timeline, with a caption under it: which camera, at what time, and how long the clip is.
The ▶ Play the day button runs the whole day from the first recording onwards, in order, across every camera.
¶ Three "play one after another" modes
Under the player there is a play one after another drop-down. It decides what happens when the current clip ends.
| Setting | What happens when the clip ends |
|---|---|
| off | The player stops. You choose the next clip yourself |
| this camera | The next recording from the same camera starts — it answers the question "what was happening at the gate" |
| all cameras | The next recording from any camera starts, in chronological order — it answers the question "what was happening on the site" |
When the day runs out of further recordings, the mode switches itself back to off. The Play the day button sets the mode to all cameras.
💡 CVR does not convert recordings into another format. MP4 footage (from UniFi Protect among others) plays in the browser straight away. Formats the browser cannot play are available to download only — you will watch those in a media player on your computer.
¶ When playback stops working after a quarter of an hour
The addresses the video is streamed from are valid for five minutes — a safeguard so that an address copied by accident does not live forever. So if you have been going through one day for a while and you see the message "Playback failed", nothing is broken: close the archive and open it again. Fresh addresses will be issued.
¶ Thumbnails
In the recordings list, on the left of every row, there is a thumbnail — the first frame of the recording. Clicking a thumbnail plays the clip.
The thumbnail really is the beginning of the video file, not a separate picture: your browser downloads just the start of the recording and shows the first frame. Because of that:
- there will be no thumbnail for formats the browser cannot play,
- after a quarter of an hour of browsing the same day, thumbnails revealed with Show older may fail to load — for the same reason as playback (see above).
In both cases you will see a dimmed rectangle instead of a picture. That is a sign that the preview is missing, not that the recording has disappeared. Refresh the archive and the thumbnails come back.
¶ Downloading a single recording
There are two routes:
- From the recordings list — click Download in the row of the recording you want. This works for any footage, including footage that will not play in the browser.
- From the button bar — click Download clip. This button downloads the recording that is currently in the player, so play it first.
You get the original file, exactly as the recorder produced it — no conversion, no watermark, no change in quality.
The list shows the 20 most recent recordings of the day; the Show older button adds another twenty.
💡 If a recording is going to be evidence, download it and keep your own copy. Footage sitting in the archive is subject to ordinary rotation: when the storage runs out of room, the oldest recordings are deleted, and CVR has no way of exempting a particular clip. Issuing a link does not protect it either. More on when and what gets deleted: Retention — why recordings disappear.
¶ Selecting a range and downloading it as a ZIP package
When an event is spread across a dozen or more clips, downloading them one by one makes no sense. Select a time range on the timeline and CVR will pack everything that starts within it into a single ZIP archive.
¶ How to select
- Above the camera lanes there is a separate, empty band labelled selection.
- Press on it and drag — with the mouse or with your finger — from the start time to the end time. The selection is highlighted on all camera lanes as well, so you can see which clips it will cover.
- The exact from–to times appear above the selection.
- A Download selection button appears in the button bar, with the number of recordings that will go into the package in brackets.
You select on a separate band rather than on the lanes so that clicking a clip always means "play", never "select". A selection shorter than a minute is treated as an ordinary click and disappears — and the Clear selection button removes one at any time.
⚠️ The package takes in recordings that begin inside the selected window. A clip that started a minute before the selection will not be included, even if it was still running inside the window. So make your selection with a few minutes to spare before the event.
The package covers every camera on that recorder within the selected window. The panel has no field today for narrowing it down to a single camera — if you need only one, download its clips individually.
¶ What happens after you click
The package is not created immediately. The order goes into a queue and is packed in the background; you will see the message "The archive is being packed. The link will work once it is ready." In the list of links (at the bottom of the archive) the order then has the state packing and will change to ready by itself — the list refreshes every few seconds, so there is no need to reload the page. A few gigabytes take several to a dozen or so minutes to pack.
Inside the ZIP archive you will find:
- a folder for each camera, holding files named after their start time,
- a file called
SPIS.txt(Polish for "contents") listing everything in the package with exact times and lengths — along with anything that could not be packed (a damaged file does not invalidate the whole package).
¶ Three things you need to know about the package
- It uses space in your storage. The package is created in the same WebDisk Files storage where the recordings live — so the same footage takes up space a second time, alongside the originals.
- It disappears after three days. The package is deleted when the link expires and the space comes back. The recording itself of course stays — only the copy inside the ZIP archive is deleted.
- When storage is tight, CVR will refuse to pack. If the package would eat into the free space that retention keeps for tomorrow's recordings, you will see the message "The storage has no room for this package without eating into the retention reserve." That safeguard works in your favour: without it, downloading your archive would trigger the deletion of that archive. The fix: select a shorter range, revoke links you no longer need, or enlarge your storage in WebDisk Files.
¶ The limits CVR will hold you to
| Limit | Value | Message when you exceed it |
|---|---|---|
| Live links at once | 20 | "You already have the maximum number of live links — revoke one first" |
| Length of the selected range | 26 hours | "The selected range is too long" |
| Recordings in one package | 5,000 | "The selection holds too many clips for a single package — split it up" |
| Package size | 20 GB | "The selection is too large for a single package — split it up" |
You will also see "There are no recordings in the selected range" if you land in a gap in recording.
¶ Sharing with a link
A link is how you pass footage to somebody who does not have — and will not have — a WebDisk account: an insurer, a service company, the police, a building manager.
¶ How to issue a link
For a single recording: play it, then click Share a link.
For a whole event: select a range on the timeline and click Download selection — a package is created, and a link to it along with it.
In both cases the address is copied to your clipboard right away and you see the message "Link created and copied to the clipboard." — all you have to do is paste it into a message. If your browser did not allow clipboard access, the message reads "Link created — copy it from the list below."; the Go to active links button takes you to the bottom of the archive, where there is a Copy button.
¶ What this link actually is
| Property | How it works |
|---|---|
| Validity | 3 days from issue, and it cannot be extended |
| Sign-in for the recipient | Not needed — knowing the address is enough |
| Protection | Nothing but a random, unguessable part of the address |
| Password, download limit | None. The panel shows a counter of downloads, but it blocks nothing |
| Search engines | The link page is marked as off-limits to search engines and to messenger previews |
| Revocation | At any moment, with the Revoke button |
⚠️ Anyone who learns the address can open the footage. There is no second safeguard. Treat such an address as a key to a door, not as an ordinary link.
¶ What the recipient sees
On opening the address, the recipient sees a very bare page: the type of material (a recording or a package), the time range, the number of clips, the size, the expiry date, the description attached to the link and a Download button. They do not see your name, the name of your site, or any way into the panel.
⚠️ The camera name and the date travel with the footage. The panel labels the link automatically — for a single recording that is the camera name and the time, and in a ZIP package the camera names are the folder names and the entries in
SPIS.txt. The panel has no field today for changing that description. So assume the recipient will learn which camera and when — and give your cameras neutral names (Camera 3, notTill 2 shop on Piłsudskiego).
¶ The list of issued links, and revoking them
Right at the bottom of the archive is the Links you have issued section. It shows you everything you have released to the outside world: the description, the number of recordings, the size, the state (packing, ready, expired, failed) and the date the link works until.
- Copy — copies the address to your clipboard again.
- Revoke — closes the link immediately. The ZIP package is cleared from your storage on the next cleanup run.
Revoke a link as soon as the recipient confirms the download — do not wait out the three days.
⚠️ Revoking works forwards, not backwards. Somebody who clicked "Download" moments before you revoked still has fifteen minutes to finish downloading. If you suspect an address has leaked, revoking is the right first step, but it is not an instant cut-off for a download already in progress. Report such a leak to support@webdisk.io.
Revoking is one link at a time — with twenty links that is twenty clicks. There is no bulk action.
When a link to a single recording expires or is revoked, the recording is not deleted. The link simply stops working and the recording stays in the archive.
¶ Before you send a link — this footage is your responsibility
CCTV footage almost always contains images of other people: customers, staff, passers-by, the courier, the neighbour's child. A person's image is personal data, and issuing a link releases that data out of the panel — into a world where you no longer control it. The recipient can pass the address on, save the file and do whatever they like with it. As far as the law is concerned, you are the one who disclosed that data; we only supplied the tool.
So stick to four rules:
- Send it to a named person. The link goes to a specific individual who has grounds to see that footage — not to a group chat, not to a shared departmental inbox, not "to the team". The address is the only protection there is, and a shared inbox means as many keys as there are people with access to it.
- Narrow the range to the minimum. When the matter concerns two minutes, do not send a whole afternoon from every camera. Sharing more than necessary is a breach in itself — even when the recipient is a public authority.
- Check who is asking, and on what grounds. Take requests from the police, an insurer or a court in writing, with the legal basis and the case reference. Keep that document.
- Keep your own record of disclosures. The date, to whom, on what grounds, which range and which camera, who on your side decided, and when the link was revoked. The panel shows a list of links, but it will not record why they were issued.
⚠️ The CVR panel has one account per organisation. If several people know the credentials, the log will not answer the question "who watched this footage" — it will only show that the account watched it. Keep the circle of people who know the password small, write it down, and turn on two-factor authentication.
A full description of your duties as the controller of a CCTV system — signage, the privacy notice, retention periods, handling requests from people who were recorded — is in a separate document: CCTV and the GDPR — the controller's duties (available in Polish only). The terms of the service itself are set out in the terms and conditions (Polish only), and the processing of personal data on your behalf in the data processing agreement (Polish only).
¶ What the archive cannot do today
We say this plainly so that you do not go looking for features that are not there:
| What is missing | What to do instead |
|---|---|
| Searching for a person by appearance. CVR does not watch footage and never will — it recognises neither faces nor figures | Search by camera and time: calendar → day → the camera lane on the timeline |
| Deleting a single recording from the panel | Recordings are removed by retention when space runs out; you can delete all of a recorder's footage when you remove it from the panel. See Retention |
| Protecting a recording from deletion ("do not delete this clip") | Download the file and keep it outside CVR — that is the only thing that works |
| Changing the description of an issued link | Give your cameras neutral names, because those are what end up in the description |
| A password or a download limit on a link | Send the link to a named person and revoke it as soon as the download is confirmed |
| Revoking links in bulk | Revoke them one by one; the limit of 20 live links keeps the list from growing |
| Cropping the frame and blurring faces | Do that on your side, in video editing software, before you hand the footage to anyone |