In this article, we will show you how to use "rclone", a command line program that syncs files and directories to cloud storage providers.

At HostiFi, we configure your UniFi settings to perform automatic nightly backups by default.

We also have a script which logs in via SSH each night and copies the backup from the previous night over to DigitalOcean Spaces. In case there is a hardware failure on the server, this is our offsite backup to restore from.

As a third copy, we recommend that you take an occasional manual backup and save to your PC, or use this guide to keep updated UniFi backups on Dropbox.

The first step is to get SSH access as the unifi user to your HostiFi server by following this guide: https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3437198-how-to-ssh-or-sftp-into-your-unifi-server

Enter "n" to create a New remote cloud storage provider

Next, enter a descriptive name for the storage provider

Enter "9" to choose Dropbox as the storage type

Press ENTER to leave Dropbox App Client Id blank

Press ENTER to leave Dropbox App Client Secret blank

Enter "n" to skip the Edit advanced config prompt

Enter "n" to skip auto config - because we are connected to a command prompt instead of a PC, we won't be able to automatically open a web browser on the HostiFi server to complete the Dropbox authorization process, we'll have to do it on our PC locally in the next steps

To complete the Dropbox authorization, we have to download rclone to our PC and run "rclone authorize dropbox"

You can download rclone here: https://rclone.org/downloads/
If you are on Windows, you'll download and then unzip the folder

Then open CMD and use the "cd" command change directories into the rclone unzipped folder

From there you should get the help response from running "rclone.exe"

Next, we need to run "rclone.exe authorize dropbox" to trigger the Dropbox app authorization wizard.

This will open a web browser with the Dropbox app authorization request

Click the Allow button

Now you will see a success web page. You can close the web browser and go back to your rclone CMD window. You should see a response there with instructions to paste the snippet of code into your remote machine.

Copy the snippet (right click, select Mark, highlight text with left cursor, right click to copy) then head back to your PuTTY terminal with SSH access to your HostiFi server.

Paste in the snippet (right click to paste in PuTTY) and then hit ENTER, it should look like this

Enter "y" to save

Dropbox configuration is now complete! Enter "q" to quit config.

First, you may want to create a folder in your Dropbox account to sync to:

Next, run this command to do your first sync. Replace "rchase_dropbox" with the description for your cloud storage that you created during setup.

crontab -e
0 2 * * * rclone copy /var/lib/unifi/backup rchase_dropbox:unifi