Managing Storage and Retention in UniFi Protect

UniFi Protect’s Storage Manager gives you complete control over video retention, allowing you to optimize storage efficiency, meet compliance requirements, and maintain accessible footage within an intuitive interface.

Storage Manager

The Storage Overview in Storage Manager provides a clear breakdown of how your physical storage is utilized. Colored bars visually represent storage allocation, making it easy to understand your drive usage at a glance.

By configuring retention settings, you can control how long high-quality footage is retained and when recordings are archived or deleted. This ensures compliance with retention mandates while keeping your system accessible from anywhere.

Enhanced Retention: Maximize Storage Efficiency

Available in Protect 5.1 or later, Enhanced Retention automates storage management to maximize efficiency. This feature ensures that recent footage is retained at full resolution while older recordings are automatically downgraded to low quality, saving storage space without losing access to important historical data.

Key Benefits of Enhanced Retention

• Meet compliance mandates for specific retention periods.
• Manage extensive surveillance systems with significant video data.
• Extend hardware lifespan by optimizing storage use.

Set a high-quality retention period (e.g., 30 days) to ensure recent footage remains full resolution. After this period, footage transitions to low quality, and older recordings are deleted based on your final retention settings.

To enable Enhanced Retention:

1. Navigate to Protect > Settings and select Storage Manager.
2. Toggle Enhanced Retention On and set your desired high-quality retention period.

Note: Footage downgraded to low quality cannot be restored to high quality. Only new recordings will follow the updated settings.

Archiving Features

For footage that needs to be retained indefinitely or for extended periods, UniFi Protect offers several options:

• Flag Clips to prevent automatic downgrading.
• Export or Archive critical footage for external storage or long-term preservation.
• Use Case Manager to store footage indefinitely.

Further Optimize Retention Settings

If your retention goals are not met, consider these strategies:

1. Review Storage Protection Configurations: Balance redundancy and usable storage. 
2. Modify Recording Retention and Video Settings for Each Camera: In UniFi Devices, open a camera's device panel to adjust Recording Settings. For bulk adjustments, use Settings > Recording Manager.
   • Adjust retention for less critical cameras by modifying their individual Recording Retention settings.
   • Use Enhanced Encoding for better compression.
   • Lower camera resolution.
   • Enable motion-detection recording.
   • Reduce compression quality.
3. Upgrade Hardware:
   • Add larger drives (up to 24TB per drive).
   • Use an ENVR for up to 384TB raw capacity.
   • Incorporate multiple NVRs with Vantage Point for centralized management.

Managing Large-Scale Deployments

For larger deployments, Vantage Point enables centralized control of up to five NVRs or ENVRs, simplifying storage and retention management across extensive networks.