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Migrate your UniFi servers to HostiFi with the site migration wizard
Migrate your UniFi servers to HostiFi with the site migration wizard

Learn how to export your existing UniFi site from a Cloud Key or another UniFi controller to HostiFi

Alex Lowe avatar
Written by Alex Lowe
Updated over a week ago

This guide will explain what to do if you are moving from an existing Cloud Key or another UniFi controller to HostiFi.

⚠️ Note: In this guide we will only be using the Legacy User Interface. If you import a site into the New User Interface it will actually delete all other sites.

Contents

Exporting the site

First, log into your existing UniFi controller and click on the 'Settings' wheel. Make sure to use the Legacy User Interface only.

See our guide for how to change between the user interface versions.

Next, scroll down and click on the 'Export Site' button

In the new popup, click on 'Download backup file'

The file should download and be located in the downloads folder on your PC/Mac. Next, we need to press confirm.

Next, the UniFi controller will pick up our currently connected devices.

In the 'Console Inform URL', enter in your 'Hostname' which can be found from the HostiFi portal, at app.hostifi.com.

⚠️ Note: The port should be 8080

Then, click 'Migrate Devices'

Importing to new UniFi controller

Next, log into our your HostiFi UniFi controller. Switch to the Legacy User Interface. Click on the 'Current Site' drop down to reveal this menu. Once in here, click on the 'Import Site' button.

In the new popup window, enter a descriptive name, then click 'Choose File'. Upload the file from earlier in this guide, when we downloaded the backup file from the old UniFi controller.

Once completed, the UniFi devices will appear in the new UniFi controller along with their configurations.

Whether you are migrating from a Cloud Key, local UniFi install, or other cloud UniFi server, we recommend following this guide to migrate each of your UniFi sites to HostiFi.

Why not do a full backup/restore of UniFi?

We typically recommend using the site migration wizard instead of UniFi's backup/restore because:

  • A backup/restore migrates all sites and device configurations, but the devices themselves are not migrated, so you would need to have them all connected to a DNS name, and change the DNS name to the new server IP. The migration wizard is easier because it allows you to migrate the devices to the new server without changing any DNS records.

  • A backup/restore only works one time. If you have multiple UniFi servers, the only way to migrate them into the one HostiFi server is to use the site migration wizard.

Still want to do a full backup/restore?

It makes sense to do a full backup/restore if:

  • All of your existing UniFi sites are connected to one server

  • All UniFi devices connect to the server using a DNS name you control

In that case, you can do a full backup, restore, then update DNS to the new HostiFi server IP address and devices will migrate.

Troubleshooting

If the devices did not connect to HostiFi after the migration, you might have made a typo in the hostname or used a port other than 8080 in the migration wizard. You can still SSH into each device and set-inform it to manually adopt to the new server.

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