How to Set Up a UniFi Protect NVR — and Migrate Cameras From an Old One

Before you start: what you need

Recorders arrive with less in the box than people expect, and the missing pieces are the ones that stop a Saturday install:

Choosing drives — the decision people get wrong

Three rules, in order of how often they are broken:

1. Use surveillance-rated drives. Desktop drives are designed for intermittent use and fail early under continuous writing. Surveillance drives are built for 24/7 write loads and for many drives sharing one chassis.
2. Check the compatibility list first. Ubiquiti publishes storage compatibility information, and it matters physically as well as electronically — some drives lack the mounting screw positions the caddies expect and simply will not fit.
3. Buy bigger drives than you think. Bay count is fixed; drive size is the only thing you can change later without downtime. Sixteen bays of 18 TB disks is 288 TB raw, which is why an ENVR filled with large drives is rarely retention-limited.

Size capacity with Ubiquiti's own calculator at calculator.ui.com — enter camera counts by resolution, drive size and target retention, and it tells you how many drives you need. Do this before ordering, not after.

Racking and connecting

• Fit the rails to a four-post rack. On larger recorders the chassis has handles with release triggers for sliding it in and out — use them, and get a second pair of hands for a fully populated unit.
• Check depth, not just height. A 3U enterprise recorder can be around 480 mm deep and will not fit a shallow wall cabinet.
• Connectivity is at the rear on rack models — RJ45 and SFP+ ports depending on model.
• Plan power. On a dual-supply recorder, feed the two inputs from separate circuits or separate UPS units so you survive a circuit failure, not just a component failure.
• Expect fan noise. A multi-bay recorder is audible — clearly so in a quiet room, though usually not the loudest thing in a populated rack. It belongs in a comms room, not an office or living space.

First power-on and adoption

Power it up with the network connected and it announces itself. In the UniFi mobile app the new console appears automatically for adoption — you name it, accept or decline analytics, and it moves on to storage. The process is deliberately short; the setup wizard does the work.

Storage setup: protection levels, parity and hot spares

This is the one screen worth slowing down for, because it is set at initialisation rather than changed casually later.

The wizard lists the drives it has found and reports their health, then offers storage protection levels: a basic pool that maximises usable capacity, or parity-protected configurations that reserve drives so the array survives failures. You can also nominate a hot spare — a drive that sits idle and takes over automatically when another fails.

Drive preparation then runs for a few minutes with an on-screen countdown. Once it completes, the console is ready.

Installing the applications

A UniFi console is not only a recorder. After setup you choose which applications to install — typically UniFi Protect for cameras, and on capable hardware UniFi Access for doors and UniFi InnerSpace as well. Apply any firmware update offered before going further.

If you already run one of those applications on another console — an Access install on a Cloud Key, for example — it can be migrated onto the new hardware during this stage. For sites consolidating onto a recorder with redundant power, that is worth doing deliberately rather than leaving Access stranded on a device with a single supply.

Adding the console to Site Manager

To manage the recorder alongside your other UniFi consoles — and to reach it remotely — add it to your UniFi Site Manager workspace. The process is a token exchange: generate a token in your workspace, give it a description and expiry, verify it, then paste it into the console. The device then appears in the workspace with the rest of your estate, where you can add users and manage access centrally.

This is also the mechanism that lets multiple recorders across different locations be operated as one system, which is how large deployments scale past a single recorder's camera limit.

Adopting cameras

With Protect installed, cameras on the same network appear for adoption. Adopt them individually or in bulk, let any firmware updates run, and enable smart detections on the cameras where you want person, vehicle, animal or package events rather than plain motion.

Then do the part everyone skips: check the actual view of every camera and adjust aim before you leave. It is far cheaper than a second trip up a ladder. Our camera guide covers what each model can realistically see.

Migrating cameras from an existing recorder

This is the part that makes people hesitate, and it is worth being precise about.

A UniFi Protect camera belongs to one console at a time. It cannot be adopted by a new recorder while it is still managed by the old one. So migration is a two-step process per camera: remove it from the old console first, which releases it, then adopt it on the new one.

A sane migration order

1. Build the new recorder completely first — drives, protection level, applications, firmware — while the old one keeps recording. No gap.
2. Move a small batch of cameras — two or three, ideally low-priority ones. Release them on the old console, adopt them on the new one, confirm they record and that detections behave.
3. Move the rest in batches, checking as you go, rather than releasing everything at once.
4. Leave the old recorder running until its existing footage passes your retention window.
5. Decommission it only once you no longer need what is on its drives — or repurpose it at another site.

What happens to your old footage

Plainly: footage recorded on the old recorder stays on the old recorder. Moving a camera to a new console does not move its history — the new recorder starts recording that camera from the moment it is adopted.

The practical consequences:

• Keep the old recorder powered and on the network until its footage ages past the period you are required to retain — 30, 60 or 90 days depending on your policy.
• Export anything specific before decommissioning — any clip tied to an incident, insurance claim or investigation should be exported and stored separately, not left on a device you are about to wipe.
• Do not wipe the old drives the same day you migrate, however tempting the reuse.

Both recorders can sit in Site Manager together during the overlap, so reviewing old footage while the new system runs is straightforward.

Archiving and backups

Two things worth configuring once the system is live:

• Console backups — schedule automatic configuration backups so a hardware failure does not also cost you the configuration.
• Footage archiving — footage can be archived off the recorder, including to network storage such as a UniFi NAS. This is the usual answer where retention requirements exceed what the bays can hold, or where an off-box copy is required for compliance.

Post-setup checklist

1. Storage protection level set, and usable capacity checked against your retention target
2. Firmware current on the console and every camera
3. Smart detections enabled where you want them
4. Every camera's view checked and aimed
5. Console added to Site Manager, with the right people given access
6. Automatic backups scheduled
7. Recording verified — actually scrub back through footage from each camera
8. Old recorder still running, with its retention window diarised
9. Both power supplies fed from separate circuits where the hardware supports it