v15b4 recording retention question

[rsteckler]

I'm reading through the new retention docs and a little confused on how alerts/detections and active_objects interact.

Maybe a couple of questions will illustrate where I'm confused:

1. Isn't mode superfluous under the alerts/detections categories? By definition if it's an alert/detection, there must have been motion and an active object? What would be the difference between the different modes under the alert sections?
   alert/all: retain all recordings where an alert happened
   alert/motion: retain all recordings where an alert had motion (but isn't that redundant?)
   alert/active_object: retain all recordings where an alert happened because an active_object triggered it (again, redundant?)

2. So are these two configurations effectively the same?
   Retain any active object for 3 days:

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 3
    mode: active_objects 

Retain any alert or detected object for 3 days:

record:
  enabled: True
  alerts:
    retain:
      days: 3
      mode: all
  detections:
    retain:
      days: 3
      mode: all

Thanks for clearing it up!

[NickM-27]

1. That is mostly true by default except you can still customize alerts / detections to exclude object types or areas. Perhaps you only want alerts for your front yard, detections for the sidewalk, but you still want to keep recordings that include cars driving by. You could also have cases where there is an alert but there is a gap in the middle of no motion for 10-20 seconds until another bit of activity occurs (like unloading a car) and perhaps you want to record all of that.
2. it depends on the other config parts and what gets qualified as an alert / detection