Ubiquiti announced UniFi Cloud Storage on 2 November. It is a paid off-site copy of the things you would hate to lose: smart-detection clips from UniFi Protect, and files from UniFi Drive. The price is US$5 per terabyte per month, with no egress fees for pulling your own data back out.
That is the first time Ubiquiti has offered cloud storage as a plain utility rather than a subscription tied to a camera count. It changes one specific answer we give customers, so it is worth going through properly.
What it actually stores
Two things, according to Ubiquiti's own announcement.
In UniFi Protect, you turn on archiving and choose which smart-detection events get a second copy sent up. Person detections at the back door, vehicles in the lane, whatever you have set up. It is selective by design, not a stream of everything your cameras see. Continuous 24/7 footage still lives on the drive in your console, and nothing about this changes that.
In UniFi Drive, it adds a cloud backup target for your files, which is the missing third leg if you have been trying to get to a sensible backup position with a UNAS or a Drive-capable console. We wrote about using UniFi Drive to back up Microsoft 365 earlier this year, and cloud archiving is the piece that was absent then.
Archived events and files are browsed, searched and downloaded from UniFi Site Manager, so you do not have to be on the network to get at them.
The price, in Canadian dollars
US$5 per terabyte per month is Ubiquiti's list price. At the exchange rate through late October, roughly 1.40, that lands around $7 Canadian per terabyte a month before any card fees your bank adds. No egress charge is the part worth noticing, because that is where cheap cloud storage usually gets expensive at exactly the moment you need it.
How much will you actually use? Less than people assume. Smart-detection clips are short, and you are archiving events rather than recording continuously. A house with six cameras archiving person and vehicle events is working in gigabytes a month, not terabytes, unless something is pointed at a busy road and triggering constantly. A commercial site with twenty cameras and a lot of traffic will climb faster, and that is the case to watch the usage meter on for the first month before deciding how much retention you want to keep up there.
If you want the arithmetic for local storage instead, our NVR storage math guide does the per-camera, per-day numbers for continuous recording.
Who this is genuinely useful for
Anyone whose NVR and cameras are in the same building as the thing being protected. That is the gap. A locked closet is fine against weather and accident, but a break-in where somebody takes the console takes the footage of themselves with it. An off-site copy of the detection clips closes that, and for about the price of a coffee a month it is an easy call on a commercial site.
Cottages and rentals are the other obvious one. If the console at Long Point loses power or its drive quietly fails in February, the events already archived are still there. We see failed camera drives every year and the owner almost never knows until they go looking for something.
Businesses with any kind of incident or insurance exposure should think of it as cheap evidence retention. We covered what Protect 7.3 changed about retention last month, and cloud archiving stacks on top of that rather than replacing it.
Who can skip it
If your cameras are a deterrent and you have never once gone back to look at footage, this is a subscription you do not need. We have always said that UniFi's appeal is that there is no mandatory monthly fee, and that is still true: this is optional, per-terabyte, and you can turn it off. Our post on running cameras without a subscription still stands as written.
It is also not a replacement for a properly sized drive in the console. Think of it as the second copy, not the only copy.
What to watch out for
Three practical things.
Your upload speed matters. A lot of rural Norfolk and Haldimand connections have modest upload, and archiving clips uses it. It is a small amount of data spread through the day, so it rarely hurts, but a site already struggling to upload is a site to test on before committing.
Retention terms were not published in the announcement. Ubiquiti has not stated how long archived data is held or what happens the moment you stop paying, so if this is going to be your evidence trail, ask us to confirm that in writing before you build a policy on it.
And billing is in US dollars, which means your monthly cost moves with the exchange rate. Not much money, but worth knowing if you are the person reconciling the statement.
What we recommend
For any commercial camera system we install or look after, turn it on and archive person and vehicle detections. The cost is immaterial against the value of having the clips when the console is gone. For homes, turn it on if you have ever actually needed footage, and leave it off if you have not.
We enable it as part of the systems we manage, watch the first month of usage, and tell you what it is going to cost you going forward. That is part of what a UniFi managed plan covers, and Home Care starts at $49 a month. If you would rather do the configuring yourself, Josh writes the step-by-step versions of this sort of thing up on his own site.
New camera systems get it set up from the start. Camera installation starts from $275 per camera including the cable run, mount, aiming and Protect setup, with the camera hardware quoted separately, and every job is quoted in writing before we start.
If you have cameras already and want the off-site copy turned on properly, or you are planning a system across the counties we cover, get in touch or read more about how we handle security camera installation.
Sources
- Introducing UniFi Cloud Storage, Ubiquiti blog, 2 November 2026
- What's New, Ubiquiti
- Introducing Protect 7.3, Ubiquiti blog
- US Dollar to Canadian Dollar history, 2026
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