The UNAS-Pro is great in terms of hardware. I love the hardware. The UniFi management interface is nice. I basically decided to adopt UNAS-Pro because it was “dumb storage on the network” and it gave me everything I wanted on a NAS. I had been using a QNAP device, and previously, a Synology, and previously some TrueNAS devices, but I went to UNAS for convenience of management.

It's not all sunshine and roses, though.

UniFi Drive supports “encryption” but it's not documented anywhere what it is, how it works, the algorithms, or the implementation. People have asked nicely what the encryption is and nobody from UniFi has responded. It's probably eCryptFS. If it is, it has the same limitation Synology has in terms of path length, from my understanding.

Strictly speaking, QNAP and TrueNAS both have well-documented encryption standards, algorithms, and system architecture overviews. Why does UniFi not have this?

UniFi Drive will happily back up to cloud storage and to other NASes, but they aren't encrypted clientside. Very nice! I'm sure the cloud storage is and always will be safe.

UniFi Drive 4.0 with photo backup, at least at the time of writing (March 22, 2026) is completely useless unless you keep the app open at all times. For most people, this is not acceptable. This system relies on the UniFi Endpoint app and personal drives, but if enabled, you must keep the app foregrounded to backup photos. They do say it is “automatic” but it is not automatic.

(Tested over the period of time since the app was released until today, it never worked automatically.)

iOS 26.1 added PhotoKit, but this is not supported. I, of course, complained on the forums.