Calculate backup storage costs based on backup size, frequency, retention period, and per-GB pricing. Optimize your backup budget.
Backup costs are driven by four factors: how much data you back up, how often you back it up, how long you retain copies, and the per-GB storage rate. Double any one of these and your bill doubles. For organizations running daily backups with 30-day retention, the total stored volume can be 30 times the daily backup size—a number that surprises many teams when the invoice arrives.
This calculator lets you model different backup frequencies and retention policies against your storage rate to find the optimal balance between cost and recoverability. Whether you're comparing cloud providers, evaluating on-premises vs. cloud backup, or justifying a deduplication appliance, the numbers here give you a clear cost picture for informed decision-making.
Integrating this calculation into monitoring and reporting workflows ensures that engineering decisions are grounded in real data rather than assumptions about system behavior. Precise measurement of this value supports informed infrastructure decisions and helps engineering teams optimize system architecture for both performance and cost efficiency.
Backup storage costs can spiral unexpectedly when frequency or retention increases. This calculator makes the cost impact of each decision transparent, so you can optimize your backup strategy without sacrificing data protection. Compare scenarios before committing to a policy. Precise quantification supports capacity planning and performance budgeting, ensuring infrastructure investments are right-sized for both current workloads and projected future growth.
total_stored_GB = backup_size_GB × backups_per_day × retention_days; monthly_cost = total_stored_GB × per_GB_rate
Result: $34.50/month
A 50 GB daily backup retained for 30 days stores 50 × 1 × 30 = 1,500 GB total. At $0.023 per GB the monthly cost is 1,500 × $0.023 = $34.50. If you switched to twice-daily backups, the cost would double to $69.00/month.
The biggest cost lever is reducing what you store. Deduplication alone can cut backup storage by 50–90%. Compression adds another 30–60% reduction. Combined, they can reduce a 1,500 GB backup footprint to under 200 GB of actual stored data.
Not all backups need the same storage tier. Keep the last 7 days on fast, hot storage for quick restores. Move 7–30 day backups to cool storage. Archive anything older than 30 days to cold storage. This tiered approach can cut monthly costs by 40–70%.
When comparing cloud backup costs, include storage, API requests, and egress fees. A provider with low storage rates but high egress fees may cost more overall if you perform frequent restores or cross-region replication.
Check your cloud provider's pricing page. AWS S3 Standard is about $0.023/GB/month, S3 Glacier is $0.004/GB/month. Azure Blob Hot is about $0.018/GB/month. On-premises costs vary but typically range from $0.01–$0.05/GB/month when amortized.
Daily backups provide a maximum data loss (RPO) of 24 hours. Weekly backups mean up to 7 days of potential data loss. Critical systems typically need daily or more frequent backups, while less critical data can use weekly schedules to save cost.
Retention has a linear effect on storage cost. Doubling your retention from 30 to 60 days doubles the total stored volume and therefore the cost. Use tiered retention (recent backups on hot storage, older ones on cold) to reduce the impact.
Cloud providers typically charge for data egress (restore) but not ingress (backup). AWS charges $0.09/GB for cross-region egress. For large restores, this can be significant—factor it into your disaster recovery cost model.
Use incremental backups, enable deduplication and compression, tier old backups to archive storage, and regularly prune unnecessary data before backup. Exclude temp files, caches, and recreatable data from backup sets.
No—enter the post-compression backup size if your backup software compresses data. Typical compression ratios are 2:1 for mixed data, so a 100 GB raw dataset might produce a 50 GB compressed backup.