Disaster Recovery Cost Calculator

Work out disaster recovery cost instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About Disaster Recovery Cost Calculator

The four standard DR strategies form a cost-versus-recovery-time ladder: backup and restore costs a few percent of production and recovers in hours; pilot light keeps core services running at around 15 percent; warm standby runs a scaled-down full copy at roughly half; active-active doubles cost and recovers instantly. Replication transfer is a separate line in all but the cheapest.

Formula

DR cost by strategy

DR compute = primary cost x strategy factor (0.05 backup, 0.15 pilot light, 0.5 warm, 1.0 active-active); plus replication transfer

Worked example

With the default values below, Disaster Recovery Cost Calculator returns Monthly DR cost of $12,800.00. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Primary environment monthly costminimum 0: 24,000
DR strategyone of Backup and restore, Pilot light, Warm standby, Active-active multi-site: Warm standby
Data replicatedminimum 0 TB: 40 TB
Replication transfer price per GBminimum 0: 0.02

Results

Monthly DR cost: $12,800.00
Standby compute and storage: $12,000.00
Data replication: $800.00
Expected recovery time objective: Minutes

Step by step

1Values used
2DR cost by strategy
3Monthly DR cost= 12,800.00
4Standby compute and storage= 12,000.00
5Data replication= 800.00
6Expected recovery time objective= Minutes

Assumptions and limits

The result is derived only from the 4 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

Which strategy should I choose?

Work backwards from the business RTO and RPO. Paying for active-active when the business tolerates four hours of downtime is waste; using backup and restore when it tolerates fifteen minutes is negligence.

Why is untested DR worse than none?

Because it creates false confidence. A DR plan that has never been exercised typically fails on dependencies nobody documented, and the failure is discovered during the incident.