Blog / how-to
Setting Up UniFi Protect Cameras and Retention
A practical walkthrough of UniFi Protect camera setup: wiring, adoption, recording modes, detection zones, and planning retention that holds up.
By the end of this you'll have UniFi Protect cameras adopted, recording in a way that makes sense, and enough storage that the footage is still there when you actually need it. This is for a home or small office that already has (or is about to buy) a UniFi console that runs Protect. One note before we start: Ubiquiti moves menus around between releases, so treat the paths below as a map, not gospel. The concepts don't change.
Plan the retention before you mount anything
Most people plan a camera system backwards. They pick camera spots first and think about storage never. Then six weeks later something happens, they go looking for footage from nine days ago, and it rolled off the drive on day seven.
So start with one question: how many days of footage do you need? Incidents are rarely discovered the same day. A break-in you notice Monday might have been cased the previous weekend. For most homes and small offices I treat two weeks as the floor and thirty days as comfortable.
What eats your storage is simple: number of cameras, resolution, and whether each camera records continuously or only on detections. A handful of high-resolution cameras recording 24/7 will chew through a small drive fast. You don't need precise math up front, but you do need to know which cameras need continuous recording (more on that below) and buy drive capacity accordingly. If you're running an NVR, use surveillance-rated hard drives; they're built for constant writes in a way desktop drives aren't.
Get the console and wiring right first
Protect runs on a UniFi console (a Cloud Gateway with storage, a CloudKey+, or an NVR), and the cameras are powered over Ethernet, so each camera run terminates at a PoE switch port. Check your switch's PoE budget before you buy cameras, not after.
Here's the gotcha that generates more support calls than anything else in this ecosystem: if your Protect application runs on a CloudKey or NVR and your network has VLANs, the cameras need to sit on the same VLAN as that device, or adoption fails in confusing ways. Ubiquiti says this plainly in their getting-started guide and people skip past it anyway. If you've segmented your network and built a dedicated camera VLAN (a good instinct), make sure the Protect host lives there too, or hold off on moving the cameras until after adoption.
Adopt the cameras
Plug each camera into the PoE switch and give it a minute. Then either open the UniFi Protect mobile app and follow the prompts, or go to unifi.ui.com, open your console, click into Protect, open the Devices tab, and click Adopt next to each camera. Let firmware updates finish before you judge whether anything is working; a camera mid-update behaves oddly and people start factory-resetting things that were fine.
Adopt cameras one or two at a time if you can, and name each one as you adopt it, by location, not model. Sorting out which physical camera is "G5 Bullet" versus "G5 Bullet (2)" after the fact is a nuisance.
Set recording modes deliberately
Each camera gets a recording mode under Devices, select the camera, then Recording Mode. Your options are Always (continuous), Detection Only (saves footage around triggered events), and Never.
My rule: Always for the cameras that cover entrances and anywhere a dispute could turn on what happened between events, Detection Only for low-traffic areas like a side yard or storage room. Continuous recording exists because detection isn't perfect; a person moving slowly at the edge of frame can fail to trigger an event, and with Detection Only that moment simply doesn't exist on disk. If a camera matters enough that missing thirty seconds would hurt, run it on Always and pay for it with drive space elsewhere. You can also put recording on a schedule under Settings, Recordings, if a camera only matters after hours.
Tune zones so detections mean something
Under the camera's Recording Mode settings you'll find Detection & Privacy Zones. Motion Zones define where plain motion counts; Smart Detection Zones do the same for AI detections (people, vehicles) on cameras that support them; Privacy Zones black out a region entirely and never record it.
Two practical notes. First, drop the sensitivity or shrink the zone anywhere trees, flags, or passing headlights live, otherwise your detection feed becomes noise and you'll stop looking at it, which defeats the point. Second, if a camera can see into a neighbour's windows or yard, put a Privacy Zone over it. It keeps the peace and it's the right thing to do.
Set the retention
In Protect, go to Settings, then Storage, and look at your drive utilization. You can set retention per camera (Recording Retention in the camera's recording settings) and manage recordings in bulk from the recording management screen. Recent Protect versions also offer Enhanced Retention, which keeps full-quality footage for a period you set and stretches older footage further; worth turning on once you've confirmed the basics work.
Test it like footage matters
Don't declare victory on day one. Walk through every zone, day and night, and confirm each camera caught you. Pull up a clip and scrub through it. Then set a reminder for two weeks out and check the oldest footage on each camera against your retention target, because the real number only shows up after the system has been recording actual life for a while. If a camera is falling short, that's your cue to drop its resolution, switch it to Detection Only, or add drive capacity.
Where this gets bigger than a Saturday
The one-time setup above is well within reach of a patient owner. What it doesn't cover is the ongoing part: someone watching firmware releases before applying them, keeping an eye on drive health, and re-checking retention every time a camera gets added, because each new camera quietly shortens everyone else's. That's a service, not a Saturday job. And if you're planning more than four or five cameras, a commercial site, or anything involving other people's privacy in a business setting, the planning stage deserves a second set of eyes. If you've got a design or a quote in hand and want it sanity-checked, that's exactly what my second opinion is for, or just get in touch.
Sources
- Getting Started with UniFi Protect (Ubiquiti)
- UniFi Protect recording modes and schedules (Ubiquiti)
- Detection and Privacy Zones in UniFi Protect (Ubiquiti)
- Managing video storage and retention (Ubiquiti)