Azure Backup Calculator

Estimate Azure Backup cost from protected-instance fees plus the vault storage a grandfather-father-son schedule keeps.

About Azure Backup Calculator

Azure Backup bills a protected-instance fee that steps with the source size plus the vault storage the retention policy accumulates. After the first full copy every recovery point is an incremental, so vault growth is driven by the daily change rate multiplied by how long you keep history — long monthly retention dominates the total even though it stores few points. Retention policies are usually copied from a template and never costed, yet extending monthly retention from 12 to 60 months multiplies vault storage several times over; this model ignores vault-side compression, so treat it as an upper bound and confirm current instance fees and storage rates in the Azure pricing calculator.

Formula

Azure Backup

daily change rate: Fraction of the protected data that changes each day and lands in an incremental
retained days: Span of history the grandfather-father-son schedule holds
instance fee: Fixed per-workload charge that scales in 500 GB steps

Worked example

With the default values below, Azure Backup Calculator returns Monthly Cost of $1,563.71. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Protected instancesaccepts 1–10,000 instances: 20 instances
Average protected sizeaccepts 1–100,000 GB: 200 GB
Daily change rateaccepts 0.1–100 %: 3 %
Daily recovery points keptaccepts 0–9,999 days: 30 days
Weekly recovery points keptaccepts 0–520 weeks: 12 weeks
Monthly recovery points keptaccepts 0–120 months: 12 months
Instance fee up to 50 GBaccepts 0–500 USD/month: 5 USD/month
Instance fee per 500 GB blockaccepts 0–500 USD/month: 10 USD/month
Vault storage price per GBaccepts 0–10 USD/GB-month: 0.0224 USD/GB-month

Results

Monthly Cost: $1,563.71
Protected Instance Fees: $200.00
Vault Storage Charge: $1,363.71
Vault Data per Instance: 3 TiB
Total Vault Data: 59 TiB
Vault Data vs Source Data: 15.22 ×
Annual Cost: $18,764.54

Step by step

1Values used
2Azure Backup
3Monthly Cost= 1,563.71
4Protected Instance Fees= 200.00
5Vault Storage Charge= 1,363.71
6Vault Data per Instance= 3,268,470,112,256
7Total Vault Data= 65,369,402,245,120
8Vault Data vs Source Data= 15.22 ×

Assumptions and limits

The result is derived only from the 9 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax or compounding frequency into account.
Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is Azure Backup calculated?

vault data per instance = first full backup + size × daily change rate × retained days, where retained days = daily points + weekly points × 7 + monthly points × 30; instance fee = $5 up to 50 GB, otherwise one block fee per 500 GB. Azure Backup bills a protected-instance fee that steps with the source size plus the vault storage the retention policy accumulates. After the first full copy every recovery point is an incremental, so vault growth is driven by the daily change rate multiplied by how long you keep history — long monthly retention dominates the total even though it stores few points.

Why does Azure Backup matter?

Retention policies are usually copied from a template and never costed, yet extending monthly retention from 12 to 60 months multiplies vault storage several times over; this model ignores vault-side compression, so treat it as an upper bound and confirm current instance fees and storage rates in the Azure pricing calculator.

What values do I need to enter?

This calculator takes 9 inputs: Protected instances, Average protected size, Daily change rate, Daily recovery points kept, Weekly recovery points kept, Monthly recovery points kept, Instance fee up to 50 GB, Instance fee per 500 GB block, Vault storage price per GB. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.