I posted this before but got no responses. How do people back up and archive recordings? All the file names mean nothing they don’t show then the call was made, who it was to, from etc. Is there a better way to archive the files so that in the future I can pull a call that happened a few months ago? What do most people do?
The call recording file names should have a meaning. You can archive your recordings by writing a shell script that will be executed by a cron job that will archive the recordings by file name.
For example, if you have call recording enabled for Queue Number 500, the resulting recording should have a file name similar to this in the /var/spool/asterisk/monitor directory:
q500-20101221-195739-1292990259.6.WAV
“q500” is the Queue being called and “20101221” is the date the call took place (2010-12-21). Using this information, you can write a script that will sort the recordings by queue, date, etc. There are many guides online that will show you how you can accomplish this.
Thanks I do see that now but it doesn’t show who was called or anything which is unfortunate. Like I have an outbound call I made to my dad yesterday, it shows the file name is “OUT4945-20101221-133841-1292956721.38”. Out is of course outbound, 4945 is my extension and 2010-12-21 is the date and I assume the next part is 13:38 for the time. No idea what 1292956721 is though that’s not his number.
The issue too is inbound calls, here’s one that I received “20101221-144355-1292960635.80” So looks the same, date, time, but again from that I have no idea that they called my extension, no idea what the person’s caller ID was or anything.
Sorting simply by queue or outbound isn’t really helpful. If a customer calls and has a complaint and says they spoke with one of my reps 4 months ago and was told something other than what we normally would say, there’s really no way to find that call. We record all calls and you can only keep 2 maybe 3 months worth then they stop recording and it says the spool is full so you have to archive, even though the hard drive has tons of space left. Just seems a bit silly to me that it wouldn’t put something so basic as the person’s caller ID in the file name so that I can just search through files that contain their number.
Actually as soon as I posted that I think I just came up with a solution. All I’d need to do is when I archive, I can just export the CDR report that shows all calls for the past 3 months for example and save that as Excel. That way I can search that file to find the persons caller ID or who they called, see the date/time and then simply browse the file names to locate it.