Database recovery is tricky at the best of times, and it never seems to happen when and how you expect. In this case, my self-hosted Zoneminder server crashed hard and came up broken. It appears to be related to some index or table in the database getting corrupted, but I’m not enough of a “database surgeon” to say with any certainty. When this crash happened, the first sign was that the mariadb service was crashlooping.

While there are plenty of IOT security cameras that promise privacy, none of them really do. Eufy recently got busted for secretly accessing peoples' feeds, Unifi got breached, and literally every off-shore IOT device is slurping as much metadata (and regular data) off your devices as they possibly can. It’s not hard to understand a need for secure and private home security devices. Despite its age and legacy, ZoneMinder is still by far the most capable and complete solution for this.