Estimate cloud backup storage costs including storage fees, restore charges, and retention policies. Budget for AWS Backup, Azure Backup, or S3 Glacier.
Cloud backup storage is essential for data protection, but costs can surprise you when factoring in retention policies and restore fees. Storage rates vary by tier: S3 Standard at $0.023/GB, S3 Glacier at $0.004/GB, and Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB. However, restore costs can be steep—Glacier restores cost $0.01–$0.03/GB plus expedited fees.
Retention policies significantly impact total cost. Keeping 30 daily backups, 12 monthly backups, and 5 yearly backups of a 1 TB database can accumulate 47 TB of backup data, costing $188/month even at Glacier rates. Lifecycle policies that purge old backups are critical.
This calculator estimates the monthly cost of backup storage based on total data size, per-GB storage rates, and restoration costs. Use it to optimize your retention strategy and choose the right storage tier for your recovery time objectives.
This measurement provides a critical foundation for capacity planning and performance budgeting, helping teams align infrastructure resources with application requirements and growth projections.
Backup costs often grow 10–50x beyond the source data size due to retention policies and daily snapshots. Without careful planning, backup storage can become one of your largest cloud expenses. This calculator helps you model the real cost of your retention strategy. Having accurate metrics readily available streamlines incident postmortems, architecture reviews, and technology roadmap discussions with engineering leadership and product teams.
Storage Cost = backup_GB × storage_rate Restore Cost = restore_GB × restore_rate Total Monthly = Storage Cost + Restore Cost
Result: $20.50/month
5 TB of backup data in S3 Glacier at $0.004/GB: $20.00/month. 50 GB of monthly restores (test restores) at $0.01/GB: $0.50/month. Total: $20.50/month. The same data in S3 Standard would cost $115/month—5.6x more but with instant access.
S3 Standard: $0.023/GB, instant access, free retrieval. S3 Infrequent Access: $0.0125/GB, $0.01/GB retrieval. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: $0.004/GB, millisecond access, $0.03/GB retrieval. S3 Glacier Flexible: $0.0036/GB, minutes to hours retrieval. S3 Glacier Deep Archive: $0.00099/GB, 12–48 hour retrieval. Choose based on your RTO requirements.
The biggest wins come from: incremental backups (90–95% less daily storage), deduplication (20–50% reduction in total storage), lifecycle policies (auto-tier to Glacier after 30 days), and retention pruning (delete backups beyond policy requirements). Combined, these can reduce backup costs by 70–85%.
For disaster recovery, replicate backups to a second region. Cross-region replication costs $0.02/GB for the transfer plus storage in the destination region. For a 5 TB backup set, this adds roughly $200/month total for true geographic redundancy. Consider this the insurance premium for your data.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB/month ($1.01/TB) is the cheapest. However, restores take 12–48 hours and cost $0.02/GB. Only use Deep Archive for compliance archives you rarely need to access. For operational backups, Glacier ($0.004/GB) is a better balance.
S3 Standard: free retrieval, only data transfer charges. Glacier: $0.01/GB (standard, 3–5 hours), $0.03/GB (expedited, 1–5 minutes), $0.0025/GB (bulk, 5–12 hours). Glacier Deep Archive: $0.02/GB (standard, 12 hours), $0.05/GB (bulk, 48 hours).
Common policy: daily backups for 30 days, weekly for 12 weeks, monthly for 12 months, yearly for 3–7 years. Regulatory requirements may mandate longer: SOX requires 7 years, HIPAA requires 6 years, GDPR has no minimum but requires documented policy.
AWS Backup centralizes backup management for EC2, RDS, EFS, DynamoDB, and more. It adds no cost beyond the underlying storage ($0.05/GB for warm, $0.01/GB for cold). The operational simplicity of a single backup dashboard justifies it for most organizations.
After the initial full backup, incremental backups only store changed data blocks. If 5% of a 1 TB database changes daily, the incremental backup is only 50 GB instead of 1 TB. Over 30 days: 1 TB full + 30 × 50 GB incremental = 2.5 TB vs 30 TB for daily full backups.
Enable S3 Object Lock with Governance or Compliance mode to make backups immutable. Use separate AWS accounts for backup storage (air-gapped). Enable MFA Delete on S3 buckets. Regularly test restores to verify backup integrity. These measures prevent attackers from deleting or encrypting your backups.