Cloud Backup Cost Calculator

baseline = primary GB ÷ dedupe ratio; held data = baseline + daily delta × (dailies + 7 × weeklies + 30 × monthlies); cost = hot GB × hot rate + archive GB × archive rate + restored GB × retrieval rate. Backup capacity is driven by change rate and retention depth, not by the size of the primary dataset — a weekly copy has to carry seven days of change and a monthly copy thirty, which is why long retention grows storage faster than people expect. Deduplication is applied once to the baseline so it flows through every incremental, and copies older than the tiering threshold move to the archive rate.

Retention schemes are usually set by policy and never costed, so a 12-month monthly retention can quietly double the backup bill while adding little recovery value. Archive tiers look almost free until a restore triggers retrieval fees, so both meters belong in the estimate — check the current rates and minimum storage durations with your provider.

This calculator takes 13 inputs: Primary data protected, Daily change rate, Deduplication and compression ratio, Daily backups kept, Weekly backups kept, Monthly backups kept, Days before a copy moves to archive, Hot backup storage rate, Archive storage rate, Data restored per month, Retrieval rate, Keep a copy in a second region, Inter-region transfer rate. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.

Archive classes trade a very low storage rate for a per-gigabyte retrieval charge and often a minimum storage duration. If you restore regularly, the retrieval fees and early-deletion charges can exceed the storage saving, which is why the tiering threshold should match your real recovery pattern.