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NovaVMS Manual

Decommission a site

Use this when a site is permanently closing (lease ended, tenant moved out, site consolidated). Cameras are soft-deleted — event history is preserved for the retention window — but the gateway and site records are removed outright.

Procedure

  1. Confirm the customer has authorised decommissioning, in writing. Keep the email with the work order.

  2. Export all clips of interest. NovaVMS does not ship a single “Bulk export” button today — instead, filter Events by site, then for each event you need, use Export clip as evidence per US-OPS-07. Budget time accordingly: ~2 GB per camera per month of 24/7 recording, so a 10-camera site with one month of retention is 20+ GB of clip downloads.

  3. Export the site’s audit log. The CSV export endpoint is not yet shipped (see Phase 9 audit findings); until it lands, capture audit evidence by taking screenshots of the filtered audit log view or by running an SQL query against audit_log filtered by org_id and site_id via platform-admin access. This is your evidentiary record.

  4. Disable all alert rules scoped to this site. Admin → Alert rules → filter by site → Disable. Prevents spurious cool-down alerts while cameras go dark.

  5. Soft-delete every camera at the site. Cameras → filter by site → bulk select → Delete. Confirms one by one.

  6. At the physical site, cut PoE at each switch port. Unmount cameras. Reclaim cable if re-use is planned.

  7. Power off the gateway host. Unplug it from the rack. Tag with site name + decommission date for RMA or inventory.

  8. In the UI, Gateways → (this gateway) → Delete. If the delete button is disabled, a camera is still attached — return to step 5.

  9. Admin → Sites → (this site) → Delete. Confirm by typing the site name.

  10. Verify in Audit log that site.deleted, gateway.deleted, and N × camera.deleted entries are present with the same correlation timestamp.

Common variations

  • Gateway hardware being redeployed to another site — factory-reset the gateway (wipe /etc/novavms/gateway.yaml) before re-pairing at the new site. Re-using an API key across sites is not supported.
  • Cameras being redeployed — factory-reset each camera via its web UI before remounting. Old motion zones and NTP config are scene-specific.
  • Partial decommission (one floor of a multi-floor site) — don’t delete the site. Delete only those cameras and leave the gateway.

If this didn’t work

  • Gateway delete returns 409 → one or more cameras are still attached or disabled-but-not-deleted. Re-check the camera list.
  • Site delete hangs → check the audit log for a camera.delete still pending; wait 30 s and retry.