UniFi Cloud Storage adds off-site archiving at $5 per terabyte

Ubiquiti has announced UniFi Cloud Storage, a subscription service that keeps an off-site copy of selected UniFi Protect events and UniFi Drive files. It is priced at $5 per terabyte per month, with no egress fees for retrieving data.

The service is built into the platform rather than bolted on, so archiving is enabled from within UniFi Protect or UniFi Drive instead of through a third-party cloud account. For anyone running cameras on a single local recorder, it is the first properly native answer to the obvious question of what happens when that recorder is stolen or destroyed.

Ubiquiti has not published Australian pricing or stated which currency the headline figure refers to, so treat the number as indicative until local details appear.

What gets archived from UniFi Protect

Rather than mirroring every second of footage to the cloud, UniFi Cloud Storage works on smart-detection events. Once archiving is switched on, flagged events are automatically copied off-site in addition to being held on local storage.

• Smart-detection events are archived automatically once enabled
• The cloud copy sits alongside, not instead of, local recording
• Archiving is configured directly inside UniFi Protect
• Events remain available if local hardware is lost or damaged

That selective approach is the sensible one for Australian sites on consumer-grade NBN or fixed wireless, where continuous upload of multiple camera streams would be impractical.

Off-site backup for UniFi Drive data

The second half of the service targets UniFi Drive, letting you push a copy of file data off-site to round out a 3-2-1 backup strategy — three copies, two media types, one of them remote. Until now that off-site leg generally meant scripting a sync to someone else’s object storage or rotating a second appliance to another location.

For small businesses running a UniFi network attached storage appliance as their main file share, this closes a real gap. Local redundancy protects against a failed disk; it does nothing against fire, flood or theft.

Browsing and retrieving what you have stored

Archived events and files are presented together in UniFi Site Manager, with search and direct download from the archive. Ubiquiti is also making a point of the usage and spend visibility, so you can see how much you are storing before the bill arrives.

The no-egress-fee position is the detail worth noting. Retrieval charges are where hyperscaler object storage quietly becomes expensive, and they are exactly the charge you incur at the worst possible moment — when you are pulling footage after an incident or restoring files after a failure.

BUZY’s take

This is a genuinely useful addition rather than a headline feature, and it lands in the gap that has bothered us most about single-site UniFi Protect deployments. A camera system whose only copy of the evidence lives in the cupboard next to the front door is a camera system with an obvious weakness, and until now the fix was either a second recorder at another site or a manual export habit nobody keeps up.

For prosumers, the value depends on your upload link. If you are on a decent fibre plan, archiving smart-detection events is low-volume and well within reach; on fixed wireless or congested shared infrastructure, test before you commit. The event-only model keeps the data footprint sane either way, and it pairs naturally with the local retention improvements we covered in UniFi Protect 7.3.

For integrators, this is something to raise at the design stage rather than after an incident. A few practical points:

• Off-site archiving is a recurring cost, so it belongs in the proposal and the handover document, not as a surprise later
• It does not replace sizing local storage properly — the cloud copy is selective, not comprehensive
• Sites with poor upstream bandwidth may still need an on-premise second copy
• Power protection on the recorder still matters, since an unexpected shutdown mid-upload helps nobody

For SMB IT, the UniFi Drive side is arguably the bigger deal. Plenty of small Australian businesses are running a single storage appliance with no credible off-site leg at all, and a native backup target priced per terabyte with no retrieval penalty is a far easier internal sell than a cloud project. It is worth checking whether the retention terms and data location meet whatever compliance obligations you carry, because Ubiquiti has not detailed where data is stored.

Our read overall: a sensible, modestly priced service that removes a weak point in the UniFi ecosystem. It does not change what hardware you specify, but it should change how you talk about resilience when you specify it.

Read the full announcement at blog.ui.com.