In this use case example, we will look into pulling data from remote workstations and moving it to a central server. For example, gathering video recordings from surveillance cameras located in remote offices or stores.
Resilio Connect achieves this task through a Consolidation Job. The Consolidation Job is designed to collect data from multiple agents onto a storage server or servers. This is a scheduled job where Resilio Connect takes the files from defined paths on source agents and copies them to a specified location on a destination server. On the server, the data is grouped by subfolders named after the agent it arrived from.
This example assumes that you’ve already connected workstations as Resilio Connect Agents to the Management console.
In our example, we will be collecting CCTV videos from 4 agents that should upload the videos to the Management Console:
First, create a new job through "Jobs" tab -> "Configure jobs" tab -> "Create new job" button:
Select "Consolidation" job type:
Give it a name so it can be easily recognizable:
Choose Source agents. Agents selected here will be uploading their data. You can select desired agents one by one, or select a group of agents: create a new group or use the group that you already created. Here, we created "DVR Source" group that includes four source agents:
The following step - specifying the path on source agents - is crucial. At this step, we will pick the path from where agents will upload files. Here, we select an identical source path for all agents in "DVR Source" group, assuming they have identical folder structures and same OS:
We will use a folder browser to select a custom path. Note that if agents run on different OSes, we have to put path for each OS type:
Let's browse "Workstation001" agent as an example, select the source folder and save the changes:
This means all the source agents will upload contents of their respective "C:\DVR Recordings" folders:
Then we choose the Destination agent. We select the Management Server - that’s where we want to collect the data from source agents.
When specifying path, you can leave the default path, browse or type another custom path, or select a predefined path macro. We will leave a default path here. Note the %SRC:AGENT_NAME% tag: it means that for every agent, a subfolder with its name will be created and files from that agent will be stored there.
Skip "Triggers" step for now. Next, select the Job Scheduler. We will run this job nightly at 3 AM.
Skip "Settings" and "Notifications" steps. Review the job and save it. The job will run every day at 3 AM, but you can also run it straight away by selecting it and clicking "Start".
Source agents will look for the provided directories and index files. The uploading of files will start in another thread. Once finished, the files will appear on the destination Server. Each source agent will put its files into a separate directory.
That’s it! In a couple of steps, we created a data consolidation job that will collect video footage from our CCTV devices and put them on a central server.