For years the honest answer to “what happens to the footage if they take the recorder” was a shrug and a workaround. Point Protect at a Google Drive, hang a second NAS in a closet, promise to set it up on the next visit. Most of those setups never got finished, and the ones that did broke the first time a token expired. Ubiquiti’s UniFi Cloud Storage, announced the first week of November, is the native version of that workaround, and it changes the conversation from “can we” to “how much.”
The short version
- It archives events, not the timeline. Selected Protect smart detections go off-site; the 24/7 recording stays on the NVR.
- $5 per TB per month, no egress fees. Billed on exact usage, with a $5 monthly minimum, plus tax.
- Most sites never leave the minimum. A sixteen-camera business keeping ninety days lands around half a terabyte to three quarters of one.
- Turn it on everywhere, sell it inside the plan. The revenue is the service agreement, not the storage.
- Not a compliance product. Continuous off-site retention is still a different purchase. Say so in writing.
What it is, precisely
- Protect smart-detection archiving. Clips for the detections you select (person, vehicle, package, and so on) are copied to Ubiquiti’s cloud automatically. Not the 24/7 timeline. The recorder keeps that.
- UniFi Drive backup. Scheduled cloud copies of a UniFi NAS, which turns a single NAS into a legitimate three-two-one arrangement.
- Price. $5 per terabyte per month, billed on exact usage, $5 monthly minimum, plus tax. No egress fees, so pulling clips back out costs nothing.
- Where. Ubiquiti’s cloud, powered by Backblaze, US East today with more regions promised. Browse, search and download from UniFi Site Manager, with usage and spend visible there.
The math on a real site
Take a sixteen-camera small-business system that logs, generously, 400 smart detections a day across all cameras. At roughly 10 to 20 MB per clip on a 4K camera with a sensible pre-roll, that is 4 to 8 GB a day, or 120 to 240 GB a month. Keep ninety days and you are sitting around half a terabyte to three quarters of one. Call it $3 to $4 a month of storage, which rounds up to the $5 minimum. A ten-camera house with person and vehicle detections only will rarely leave the minimum.
| Sixteen-camera small business | Our estimate |
|---|---|
| Smart detections archived | 400 a day (generous) |
| Clip size, 4K with sensible pre-roll | 10 to 20 MB |
| Archive growth per day | 4 to 8 GB |
| Archive growth per month | 120 to 240 GB |
| Held at ninety days | About 0.5 to 0.75 TB |
| Storage cost at $5 per TB | About $3 to $4 a month |
| What the client is billed | The $5 monthly minimum, plus tax |
Two things follow. First, the cost is low enough that there is no reason not to switch it on for every Protect system you deploy. Second, the cost is low enough that it is not a revenue line on its own. The revenue is the service plan it belongs in, and the sale it rescues when the client asks the recorder question.
What it is not
It is not cloud video recording in the Verkada or Rhombus sense. The full timeline still lives on the NVR, and if a client needs continuous off-site retention for compliance, this is not the product. It is also not a hedge against Ubiquiti itself: the archive lives in Ubiquiti’s account structure, and Backblaze is the plumbing. For most residential and small-commercial work, neither point matters. For a regulated site, say so in writing before the client assumes otherwise.
How we would deploy it
- On by default. Activate it in Site Manager on every new Protect install and on every service visit to an existing one. Treat it like enabling backups on a server.
- Archive people and vehicles only. Animal and motion detections inflate the bill and nobody reviews them. Add packages on a porch camera, licence plates on a gate camera.
- Set the spending alert. Site Manager lets you set a threshold. Set it at double the expected bill so a misconfigured camera on a busy street does not surprise anyone.
- Put the UniFi Drive backup on the same account where a NAS exists. The client already pays for the storage, and the NAS is usually the only copy of the family photos.
- Bill it inside the plan. Fold the $5 to $15 a month into the monitoring or service agreement rather than passing a Ubiquiti invoice through. The client buys “your evidence survives a theft,” not a storage tier.
The quiet strategic part
Ubiquiti has spent two years closing the gaps that sent integrators to subscription camera platforms: AI detections, enterprise NVRs, access, intercoms, and now the off-site copy. The remaining argument for the cloud-native brands is the management layer and the contract revenue it comes with. Cloud Storage does not close that gap, but it removes the single most common objection to specifying Protect in a site that will never see a compliance auditor. Expect more of these announcements, and expect each one to make the “but what if the box is stolen” line a little shorter.
Frequently asked
Does it record 24/7 to the cloud? No. It archives the smart-detection events you select. The continuous timeline stays on the recorder.
What does it cost to pull clips back out? Nothing. There are no egress fees. Storage is $5 per terabyte per month on exact usage, with a $5 monthly minimum, plus tax.
Can the client reach the archive if the console is gone? Yes. Ubiquiti says the cloud copies are available even when a console is offline, and they are browsed and downloaded from Site Manager.
Does the spending alert cap the bill? No. The warning trigger sends an alert at your threshold. With auto-expand on, Ubiquiti’s own alert says storage keeps expanding automatically.
Where does the data live? In Backblaze data centers. US East is available now; Ubiquiti lists US West, Canada and the European Union for December 2026.
Is it end-to-end encrypted? Not yet. Ubiquiti says end-to-end encryption is coming to Drive backups and Protect archives, with keys only the customer holds, and that UniFi cannot read or recover that data. Decide who keeps the passphrase before you turn it on.
Source: Ubiquiti’s UniFi Cloud Storage announcement on blog.ui.com. Images and video courtesy of Ubiquiti. Storage estimates are ours and depend on camera resolution, pre-roll and detection settings. The Journal is published by the team behind Shield Low Voltage, a UniFi installer in Utah; see About.