Remote storage

Remote storage is the off-box home for anything that shouldn't live and die with the server: scheduled backups and archived recordings and logs.

Supported destinations

Admin → System → Remote Storage connects one location:

• S3-compatible object storage (AWS S3, MinIO, Wasabi, …)
• SFTP (with password or SSH key authentication)
• FTP

Enter the endpoint/path and credentials, then Test connection — it verifies access and creates the archive folder structure, so a green test means the whole pipeline will work.

What ships there

Two independent consumers share the location:

• Backup archive — the scheduled backup destination, with its rotation and passphrase (see backup and restore).
• Data archiving — a per-data-type table (recordings, voicemails and faxes) with its own folder, an auto-archive age threshold, and a manual Move to Archive action.

Getting archived media back

Archiving is not a one-way trip. The Recordings, Voicemail and Fax pages each have an Archived folder that lists what is in the store; playing or downloading an archived item fetches it back with a progress bar and caches it locally for a day. The remote layout mirrors 3CX's — recordings/, voicemails/ and faxes/, one folder per extension — so a store that already holds a site's 3CX archive shows those files too, with caller, callee and time read from 3CX's own file names. An archive run interrupted by a restart resumes on its own.

Choosing a destination

Anything durable and off the PBX host is better than nothing; ideally it's also off-site (object storage, or SFTP on another premises). A NAS in the same rack protects against disk failure but not against the rack. And remember the backups themselves are encrypted — the storage provider never sees plaintext.