Can I set it to always be recording but keep overwriting the file after say 8 hours?

[SY256]

I want to keep it always recording so I can quick-scroll to remind myself how I'm wasting the day, but I don't wanna eat up all the space. I would probably forget to press record/stop. The idea is I set it once and then it runs till I notice it again and wonder why the hell I haven't completed my goal, look over the video 'oh yeah...5 hours of pointless reddit/youtube/quora, I should stop that'

Ideas?

I posted this on reddit but figured I'd try here

 

[AaronD]

The Replay Buffer goes up to 21600 seconds for me, which is 6 hours:

And there's also this setting, which goes out to 1 year for me:

If you use that one, then you should probably have some sort of "garbage collector", outside of OBS, to clean up the old files. That could be part of the OS, or a script, or whatever.

 

[SY256]

The Replay Buffer goes up to 21600 seconds for me, which is 6 hours:
View attachment 94917
And there's also this setting, which goes out to 1 year for me:
View attachment 94918
If you use that one, then you should probably have some sort of "garbage collector", outside of OBS, to clean up the old files. That could be part of the OS, or a script, or whatever.

Thanks, I think I like the 2nd way best, but now I'm reconsidering the whole thing because someone said writing video to the HD (SSD) so much could wear it out. Do you agree? The workaround would be to save it to an external drive but then I have to keep the external with the laptop all the time and its a hassle just for monitoring the day.

How exactly does the replay buffer work?

 

[AaronD]

someone said writing video to the HD (SSD) so much could wear it out. Do you agree? The workaround would be to save it to an external drive but then I have to keep the external with the laptop all the time and its a hassle just for monitoring the day.

Solid-state and mechanical drives wear out differently. Pick your poison.

SSD's wear out purely by writing, and they fail in two ways:

1. Slowly shrinking to eventually match the capacity to the actual data stored at that moment.
2. Reading back something different from what was written.

Of course, the preferable failure mode is #1, and they're designed to do that if at all possible, but #2 has still been known to happen.
(actually, #2 is pretty much guaranteed internally, and the drive figures that out and converts it to #1 by recovering it to a new internal location and fixing up its access tables so that you don't know the difference...and the failed section becomes unavailable forever)

Spinning platters have a number of different failure modes, ranging from bearing failure, to a head crash, to whatever. Some give you warning; others just happen out of the blue. But there's no limit to the amount of data that they can handle over time.

How exactly does the replay buffer work?

I've never actually used it, but my understanding is that it's a RAM buffer that gets flushed to disk somewhat rarely. Someone else probably knows better.