Setting up a VICIdial archive server

Recordings fill a disk faster than anything else on a dialer. A busy Campaign can write tens of gigabytes of audio a day, and once the partition that holds those files runs out of room, the box stops recording calls and sometimes stops dialing. An archive server fixes that by moving old audio and call logs off the live dialer onto a second machine built for cheap, deep storage.

The idea is simple. The dialer keeps only recent recordings on fast local disk. Everything older than your hot window gets copied to the archive box, verified, then deleted from the dialer. The archive box does no telephony work, so it can run slow spinning disk, a big network volume, or object storage behind it.

What an archive server actually holds

Two things, mostly. First, the Call recording WAV or MP3 files that pile up under the Asterisk monitor directory. Second, the older rows from the heavy MySQL log tables — the call detail records and the dial logs that grow without bound. Your Recording format (WAV/MP3) choice matters here: MP3 at a sane bitrate is a fraction of the size of raw WAV, and on an archive that stores months of audio, that difference is real money. Pair the archive with a clear Recording retention policy so files do not live forever by accident.

How the move works

flowchart LR
  A[Dialer box recordings disk] -->|rsync nightly| B[Archive server storage]
  B -->|verify checksum| C{Copy good?}
  C -->|yes| D[Delete from dialer]
  C -->|no| E[Keep on dialer retry]
  A -->|old log rows| F[Archive DB tables]

A nightly cron job on the dialer runs rsync to push recordings older than your hot window to the archive box, checksums the copy, and only then removes the local file. Web playback of old calls is handled by pointing the recording lookup at the archive path or by serving those files back over a read-only mount. None of this touches Asterisk or your SIP trunk traffic, so live calls keep flowing while the archive job runs in the background.

For the database side, you archive old rows out of the busy log tables into matching tables on the archive server, then prune the originals. This keeps reporting queries on the live box fast because they scan a smaller, recent dataset. The archive box becomes the place you go for deep historical reporting that does not need to be instant.

Sizing the two boxes

The dialer needs fast disk and only enough of it to hold your hot window plus headroom. The archive needs slow, large, durable disk and very little CPU. Many self-hosters back the archive with a network volume or object storage so capacity grows without a rebuild. If you run a cluster, one archive server can serve several telephony nodes, since none of them do recording playback in real time. For deeper background on multi-box layouts, our VICIdial install guide lays out where each role belongs, and the single server versus cluster comparison explains when a separate archive role earns its keep.

The managed shortcut

On VICIfast every server is Single tenant, and recordings stay on the customer box with root SSH, so you can wire your own archive target or sync to your own storage without asking us. We provision the dialer in under 40 seconds; the archive policy is yours to set. If you would rather not stand up a second box at all, sizing the dialer with enough disk and a tight retention window is often simpler.

Decide your hot window first, then your retention, then build storage to match. See plans and disk options on our pricing page to size a box that fits your call volume.