on before recording to long term storage the video may be processed for example a date and time stamp may be applied to the video by processing 114 124 or 134 in another example the video may be re encoded or compressed before being recorded in long term storage 118 128 or 138 in normal operation one or more of nvrs 110 130 stores a portion of the video sent by a video encoder 150 152 in temporary storage 116 126 and 136 respectively for example nvr 110 may temporarily store the last 2 seconds of the video sent by video encoder 151 in temporary storage 116 nvr 120 may temporarily store the last 2 seconds of the video sent by video encoder 152 in temporary storage 126 and so on if keep alive box 160 detects a failure of an nvr 110 120 or 130 it communicates the failure to the master nvr the master nvr is the one of nvrs 110 120 or 130 that has been assigned to trigger itself or another nvr to start recording video that was previously being recorded by the failed nvr in addition the master nvr triggers the triggered nvr to transfer at least a portion of the temporarily stored video to long term storage by transferring temporarily stored video the triggered nvr records to long term storage the portion of video that the failed nvr failed to record because of the failure to illustrate consider a case where 1 nvr 1 110 is assigned to be the master nvr 2 nvr 2 120 is recording the video sent by video encoder 151 to long term storage 128 and 3 nvr n 130 is storing the.