Call record sync now supports SFTP

Your call records don’t only live in Hipcall. Finance wants the call detail records in the data warehouse, compliance wants the recordings on a server they control, and your BI team wants a CSV they can load without touching an API.

That’s what call record sync is for: it copies your call records and audio recordings out of Hipcall and into storage you own. Until now you could send them to S3 compatible storage, an FTP server, or Google Drive. Customers kept asking for one more option the one their IT teams were most likely to sign off on.

SFTP is now available as a sync destination.

Why customers asked for SFTP

The requests came from teams who already had an FTP destination working and weren’t comfortable with it.

Plain FTP sends credentials and files over the network unencrypted. For a directory holding customer call recordings, that’s a hard conversation to have with a security reviewer. SFTP solves it at the protocol level: the whole session authentication, file transfer, directory listing runs inside an SSH connection.

The reasons we heard:

• Their security policy already ruled out FTP. Many IT teams disabled plain FTP years ago. SFTP was the only file-transfer option left open on the network.
• The server already existed. Teams with an on-premise archive, a Linux backup host, or a managed SFTP endpoint didn’t want to stand up object storage just for call records.
• Data residency. Some customers need recordings on a server in a specific country, under their own retention rules, on their own disks.
• One less firewall request. SFTP runs on port 22 alongside SSH. FTP needs a control port plus a range of data ports, which makes network approvals slower.

What you get

Nothing about the sync itself changes—only where the files land. Each run writes to a dated folder on your server:

HipcallBackup/2026/07/29/
├── call_logs_20260729T031500Z.csv
├── 8f14e45f-ea3d-4c1b-9c3b-a1b2c3d4e5f6.mp3
└── 2c1a7b90-3f8d-4e2a-8b71-9f0e1d2c3b4a.mp3

• A CSV of your call records. UUID, direction, caller and callee numbers, start, answer and end times, duration, recording URL, missed-call and billing flags, caller and callee type, and who hung up. Timestamps are written in your account’s timezone in RFC 3339 format, so they load into a database or a spreadsheet without conversion work.
• The audio recordings for every call in that batch, written alongside the CSV.
• Dated folders year, month, day so a retention script or a scheduled import can find yesterday’s batch without any guesswork.

You choose how often it runs:

• Daily sync automatic, covering the last 24 hours. Set it once and stop thinking about it.
• One-time sync pick a start and end date. Useful for backfilling an archive or handing a specific period to an auditor.

Setting it up

Go to Settings → Communication → Phone → Call sync, create a sync job, and choose SFTP Server (SSH) as the destination. You’ll need four things:

Field	Notes
Host	Hostname or IP address of your SFTP server
Username	The account Hipcall connects as
Password	Stored encrypted—see below
Port	Optional. Defaults to 22

Then pick your sync type—daily or one-time—and save.

We test the connection before we save the job. Hipcall connects to your server, writes a small test file, and deletes it again. If the host is wrong, the credentials are rejected, or the account can’t write to its home directory, you find out right then, with the reason—not three days later when you notice the archive is empty.

2 things worth checking on your side:

• The SFTP account needs write permission where the files will land. Hipcall creates the HipcallBackup/YYYY/MM/DD folder tree itself, but it can’t create what the account isn’t allowed to create.
• If your server sits behind a firewall that filters inbound connections by source, allow Hipcall to reach it on your SFTP port.

About your credentials

Your destination configuration including the SFTP password is encrypted at rest in our database.

One current limitation, stated plainly: SFTP authentication is password-based. SSH key authentication isn’t supported yet. If key-only access is a requirement in your environment, tell us—customer demand is how this feature got built in the first place.

Availability

SFTP is available now in your call sync settings. Existing S3, FTP, and Google Drive sync jobs keep running exactly as before—nothing to migrate, nothing to reconfigure.

If you’re currently syncing over plain FTP, switching takes about 2 minutes: create a new sync job pointing at the same server over SFTP, confirm the connection test passes, then deactivate the FTP job.

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Set up your first SFTP sync → Settings → Communication → Phone → Call sync

Not sure whether your server is ready for it? Get in touch with our support team and we’ll help you work through the configuration.