How did you hide it so that the thieves didn't find it?
I'm guessing with such an obvious endpoint for the camera storage it never occurred to anyone there was a second box. I had something like this in mind when I wired the building. It seemed like a good idea to make onsite security footage much harder to find given the cameras were obvious and anyone breaking in would probably look to damage or destroy the system.
I really thought the cameras themselves were the deterrent, but these guys gave it a shot anyway. Cutting the cable to the starlink and walking off with the NAS drives seemed to be the plan.
In the future I'm going to add a local battery backed alarm connected to external siren and strobe that is immediate on opening the office door to draw attention. I was driving down to WWDC when the starlink went offline and saw the notice on my phone but wrote it off to equipment failure which gave them enough time to clean the place out pretty well.
The hole in my strategy was thinking nothing could happen without notification, but being in a car in the middle of Norther CA with spotty cell coverage and lots of distractions blew that up pretty hard. I'm also thinking one of ubiquiti's cellular backups is in my future. Starlink offline is annoying but not the attention grabber that a still of a guy walking in the door would have been. Cellular backup would have gotten me that.
If they can't see, they're not going to hang about and if they've tooled up with NV then that's a whole different threat model.
The fog&dog&log never fails.
fog, dog, log, jog, hog, bog, pog, nog
Enveloping fog
Dogs and wild pigs set loose
Log launches at you off a treadmill
Trap door drops you into a flooded basement
Barrage of paper disks
Eggnog super soakers
We have one of those at our vacation home (well it's more than a vacation home: I used to live there but it's now house we use for vacation, several times a year but anyways...).
We've got that system connected to the alarm. It's amazing and the system did evolve: in the early days the fog had to be projected in the middle of the room or it'd leave traces on the walls. Now it's a fog that doesn't leave any trace anymore.
The reason it works so well it's that it means: "Now you cannot see jack shit and in a few minutes the police is going to be there".
It kicked in once: the bad people quickly left.
> If they can't see, they're not going to hang about ...
No indeed...
> and if they've tooled up with NV then that's a whole different threat model.
In my case the alarm is still there and if the company monitoring the alarm system tells the police "there are people dressed up like it's war with night-vision system", then they'll take it even more seriously.
I've had a house without my alarm on (because kid had a medical emergency and was between life and death: I left in a hurry and forgot to turn the alarm on) visited by burglars and it ain't a fun thing.
I highly recommend alarm systems that generate a fog. It's a wonderful thing.
And that fog doesn't last too long: by the time your back at your home, it's like the would-be-thieves: gone.
Wait, you have an office full of expensive equipment but decided to half-ass DIY the security? No wonder you were targeted.
A proper monitored alarm system would have prevented this. They pretty much all have built-in cellular backup now. Do yourself a favor next time and call a professional.
Don't blow your entire budget on cameras then wonder if you need an alarm system because the only good the cameras will serve is to watch your stuff disappear. You mentioned California so expect these guys to be roaming free in short order if they see any jail time at all. Good luck with seeing any restitution or getting your stuff back.
Your statement that "a proper monitored alarm system would have prevented this" is optimistic. I never had any particular expectation that if somewhat intelligent criminals decided to break in when no one was there that I wasn't going to lose whatever they could get at. The cameras let me document what happened and when and what was taken. If the imagery ends up having any other value that's a bonus rather than the point.
Chances are, the thieves were monitoring the local dispatch over the radio (rural departments are not usually doing anything fancy) and knew exactly how long they had.
But, re: alarms, I'd like to add a suggestion: Indoor sirens. They can be intolerably, painfully loud for not very much money (because piezos are cheap and square waves are easy). Using a small, random mixture of them can let them beat at different frequencies and periods, which can make them very unpleasant to behold even with hearing protection.
If you feel like being clever, you can even run them with a local battery that activates when they're disconnected. If you feel like being extra-clever, you can make them activate when they don't have the correct termination resistance at the far end of the line, or exactly the correct voltage: This way, whether the wire goes open or short, the sirens activate.
Super-extra bonus points for using a combination of methods. Any time that a thief spends figuring this out is time they aren't carrying stuff out.
And if that still seems incomplete, then: Fill the shop with smoke. They can't function when they can't even see their hand in front of their face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPgcysyFUiI
And the system should not be armed when desirable people are inside, so that problem seems like it is for the birds.
When employees forget their codes and trip the alarm when they're the first ones into the shop at whatever time, they can just go outside to escape the hellish indoor torment. Not perfect, but not so bad either when the goal is to keep people out. :)
Perhaps the smoke should have a harder trigger than the noise, though, if for no other reason than it's a consumable that eventually needs to be fed more money every time it is activated.