Understanding AWS Backup Pricing: Key Cost Drivers Explained

Introduction

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that centralizes and automates data protection across AWS services. In simpler terms, it lets you back up EBS volumes, RDS databases, S3 buckets, and more from one place, instead of managing separate backup solutions for each service. Understanding the AWS Backup service pricing is crucial – cloud backup costs can add up quickly if you’re not careful. In this guide, we’ll break down aws backup pricing as of 2025, explain how the pricing works (per-GB rates, restore fees, regional differences, etc.), and explore specific areas like AWS RDS backup pricing, AWS S3 backup pricing, and AWS Backup Vault pricing. We’ll also walk through examples using the AWS Backup Pricing Calculator to estimate costs for small, medium, and large scenarios. By the end, you should have a clear sense of AWS Backup costs and how to plan for them.

What is AWS Backup and Why Does Pricing Matter?

AWS Backup is a centralized, policy-based backup service provided by AWS. It enables you to centrally manage backups for various AWS resources (EBS volumes, RDS databases, DynamoDB tables, EFS file systems, etc.) as well as on-premises data via Storage Gateway. Instead of writing custom scripts or manually taking snapshots per service, you define backup plans and AWS Backup automates the rest – ensuring your resources are backed up and retained according to your requirements.

From a pricing perspective, AWS Backup follows AWS’s pay-as-you-go model. You pay only for what you use in terms of backup storage, data transfer, and restores – there are no upfront fees or setup charges. This usage-based model makes AWS Backup cost-efficient, but it also means costs can scale with your data. That’s why understanding the cost structure is important. A clear grasp of AWS Backup pricing helps avoid surprise bills and allows you to optimize your backup strategy (for example, choosing the right retention periods or storage tiers). In the context of aws cloud backup pricing, AWS Backup consolidates backup costs across many services into one service, which can simplify cost management – if you know how the charges are calculated. Let’s dive into the pricing details.

AWS Backup Pricing Structure and Key Components

According to the official AWS Backup pricing page, you “pay only for the backup storage you use, backup data transferred between AWS Regions, backup data you restore, and backup evaluations,” with no minimum fees. In practice, AWS Backup’s costs can be understood in a few categories:

• Backup Storage – This refers to the cost of storing your backups in AWS. Backup storage pricing is calculated per GB-month of data stored (essentially the average gigabytes stored over a month). Only the incremental data is saved for each backup after the first full copy, so you’re not charged repeatedly for unchanged data. For example, if your first backup of a 100 GB volume is 100 GB and each daily incremental backup adds 5 GB of changes, after 30 days, your total storage might be ~245 GB (100 GB + 29×5 GB of changes). You would be billed for that aggregate storage in GB-months. The exact per-GB rate depends on the resource type and AWS region. In a common region like US East (N. Virginia), warm backup storage for many services (EBS volumes, EFS file systems, etc.) costs around $0.05 per GB-month. Other services have different rates – for example, Amazon RDS backups run around $0.095 per GB-month (in N. Virginia) for storage beyond the free allowance, and Amazon DynamoDB on-demand backups are about $0.10 per GB-month for warm storage. AWS Backup also offers a cold storage tier for certain services (EBS, EFS, DynamoDB, etc.), which is much cheaper per GB (roughly $0.01–$0.03 per GB-month for those services) but with some trade-offs. Cold storage backups must be kept for a minimum of 90 days and are slower/more expensive to retrieve. (In other words, you pay a lot less to store cold/archive backups, but if you delete them before 90 days, you’ll still be charged for the 90-day period.) Not every resource supports cold storage – for example, aws backup vault cold tier is available for EBS and EFS, but not for RDS or S3 (those are warm-only). Backup storage charges can vary by region as well. Heavily used regions like US East often have the lowest rates, while some regions (e.g. us-west-1 or EU regions) may be slightly higher (e.g. ~$0.06 per GB-month). Always check the official AWS Backup pricing page and select your region for exact per-GB rates.
• Restore (Data Retrieval) – When you restore a backup (i.e., recover data from AWS Backup back to a service), AWS charges a fee based on the volume of data restored. This is essentially a retrieval fee. For most services using warm storage, the restore rate is about $0.02 per GB in many regions. For instance, restoring a 10 GB backup would cost roughly $0.20 in data restore charges. Cold storage restores are more expensive – if your backups are archived, you’ll pay a higher per-GB fee to retrieve them (for example, restoring an archived EBS snapshot costs $0.03/GB ). Note that some services don’t impose a restore fee for warm backups: for example, restoring an EBS volume from a snapshot is effectively free from AWS Backup’s perspective (you instead pay for provisioning the new EBS volume storage) – AWS Backup doesn’t charge a specific data restore fee for EBS warm restores. Generally, though, you should plan on a restore charge when you perform recovery, especially for services like EFS, S3, or DynamoDB. (Also, if you restore a backup to a different AWS region or to on-premises, there may be standard data transfer-out charges as discussed next.)
• Restore Testing – AWS Backup can automatically spin up periodic “fire-drill” restores to validate that recovery points are usable. Pricing is split in two parts:‍
  

• Restore-testing evaluation fee – a flat $1.50 per backup / recovery-point tested (in us-west-2; most regions are identical) —this is the orchestration charge that kicks off the test.‍
• Restore-testing storage – any data restored for the test is billed at the standard Restore per-GB rates you already pay for warm or cold restores (≈ $0.02 / GB warm; ≈ $0.03 / GB cold).

You’ll still incur S3 PUT fees if objects are copied back to S3, and if you leave a test restore running, normal service-side storage costs apply. For archived EBS snapshots, AWS temporarily places the snapshot in the warm tier for one day and bills that day of warm storage. In short, treat restore tests like an insurance drill—budget a few dollars per test and run them on a cadence that meets your compliance needs.

• Cross-Region Data Transfer – AWS Backup allows you to copy backups to other AWS regions or other accounts (for disaster recovery or isolation purposes). When you transfer backup data across regions, you incur data transfer-out fees similar to other AWS services. In AWS Backup’s case, you’re charged per GB of data moved out of a region. The exact rate depends on source and destination region (it’s analogous to inter-region data transfer prices on AWS’s network). For example, transferring backups from N. Virginia to California might cost on the order of $0.04 per GB. AWS notes that there’s no charge for transferring backups within the same region (e.g. to another account’s vault in the same region, or to a logically isolated vault in-region) – you only pay transfer fees when data leaves a region. Also, the account that initiates the copy (the source) pays the data transfer-out fee, while the receiving side just pays for the storage of the incoming backup copy. So if you back up 100 GB from us-east-1 to eu-west-1, you might pay roughly 100 GB × $0.02–$0.05 (depending on regions) in transfer charges on the source side, and then the 100 GB will incur storage charges in the destination region at that region’s storage rate. Cross-region (or cross-account) backup copies are a powerful feature for resilience, but you’ll want to account for the extra transfer costs in your budgeting.

• Backup Evaluations (AWS Backup Audit Manager) – AWS Backup offers a compliance feature called Backup Audit Manager, which evaluates your backups against specific policies or controls (for example, checking that certain resources are being backed up, or that backups meet retention requirements). If you use this feature, AWS charges a small fee per evaluation. Currently, it’s a fractional cost: about $0.00125 per backup evaluation. This is typically so low that it won’t be a major part of your bill unless you’re running thousands of evaluations. (Do note that using Backup Audit Manager requires AWS Config, which itself records configuration items that have a cost of about $0.003 per item – so there can be some additional AWS Config charges when using this feature. These are relatively minor unless you have an extremely large environment with continuous backup changes.)
• Backup Search & Indexing – Backup Search creates a metadata index so you can quickly locate individual files or objects inside large backups and even do item-level restores. Costs are metered four ways (us-west-2 rates shown):

To summarize the pricing structure: AWS Backup charges you for storage, data transfer, and restore throughput, but not for things like creating backup plans or number of vaults. There are no charges for simply having the service enabled or for creating backup plans/policies – you can have many backup vaults and plans at no cost. Charges only accrue when you actually store data or move/restore it. In the next sections, we’ll look more closely at how this pricing applies to specific services (like RDS and S3), and then walk through some example scenarios.

AWS RDS Backup Pricing

When it comes to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), backups behave a bit differently than something like EBS snapshots. Amazon RDS automated backups (the daily backups RDS performs) and manual snapshots are stored in Amazon S3 behind the scenes. AWS’s policy for RDS is that “there is no additional charge for backup storage up to 100% of your total database storage for a region”. In other words, RDS gives you a free backup storage quota equal to the size of your database. For example, if you have a 500 GB database, you get 500 GB of backup storage at no charge in that region. This free allotment applies collectively to automated backups and snapshots of that DB instance – it even applies if those snapshots are taken via AWS Backup. Once your backup usage exceeds that 100% threshold (e.g., you keep snapshots beyond what fits in that free quota), you start incurring charges for the extra storage.

How much does additional RDS backup storage cost?

The exact rate varies by region, but in N. Virginia (us-east-1) it’s about $0.095 per GB-month for RDS snapshot storage beyond the free amount. Other regions are in a similar ballpark (some around $0.10). AWS Backup treats RDS snapshots the same as if you took them manually in RDS – they will consume that free quota first, then accrue charges if you store more. Importantly, AWS Backup does not currently offer a “cold storage” tier for RDS backups – RDS snapshots are warm storage only. This means you can’t archive RDS backups at a lower cost tier via AWS Backup (the way you can for EBS or EFS). RDS snapshots are always stored at the standard rate (but remember you get the portion equal to your DB size free).

Let’s illustrate RDS backup pricing with a scenario: suppose you have an RDS database of 200 GB. AWS will allow up to 200 GB of backups at no charge in that region. If you configure AWS Backup (or RDS itself) to retain, say, 7 days of daily backups and those backups total 280 GB (which is 80 GB over the free quota), you’ll be billed for ~80 GB of backup storage. At ~$0.095 per GB-month, that’s about $7.60 per month for backup storage. If you decide to keep additional long-term snapshots (beyond the automated 7 days), those will further increase the chargeable amount. Also note any snapshot restores from RDS are billed as data restores (roughly $0.02 per GB restored, similar to other services), and if you export an RDS snapshot to S3 (a different feature), that has its own pricing. But for using AWS Backup with RDS, your primary cost consideration is the storage after the free quota. The good news is that if you’re within the free quota, AWS Backup won’t incur charges for RDS at all – you could use it to orchestrate your RDS backups and pay nothing, as long as the total backup size stays under 100% of the DB size in that region.

(One common question: Does AWS Backup count toward the RDS free backup quota? The answer is yes – any snapshot of the database, whether taken by RDS’s automated system or AWS Backup, consumes that quota. AWS confirms that the 100% free backup storage includes backups taken via AWS Backup or manually. This means you can use AWS Backup to copy RDS snapshots to a central account, for example, and as long as those snapshots plus your automated backups don’t exceed DB size, you aren’t charged.)

In summary, aws RDS backup pricing under AWS Backup is essentially the same as native RDS backup pricing. Leverage the free storage where possible (by pruning old snapshots if you don’t need them), and budget roughly 9–10 cents per GB-month for any additional backup storage beyond that. There is no separate AWS Backup fee on top of what RDS snapshots normally cost.

AWS S3 Backup Pricing

AWS Backup added support for Amazon S3 backups, allowing you to protect S3 buckets (objects) on a scheduled basis. S3 is a unique case because S3’s own storage pricing is tiered and quite low, and AWS Backup provides a convenient way to capture point-in-time backups of S3 data. Pricing for AWS Backup of S3 has a few components to be aware of.

Storage cost: When you protect S3 with AWS Backup, the backed-up data is stored in a backup vault (internally, likely in Amazon S3 Glacier or a similar storage, but abstracted as AWS Backup). You pay a per GB-month charge for that stored data, similar to other services. In a typical region, the cost is around $0.05 per GB-month for S3 backups (warm storage). Notably, there is currently no cold storage tier for S3 in AWS Backup – S3 backups can’t be archived to a lower-cost tier via AWS Backup. So you’ll pay the warm storage price for as long as you keep those S3 backups.

S3 API request costs

Backing up S3 via AWS Backup involves reading objects from S3, and potentially listing objects, etc. AWS Backup will incur S3 GET and LIST requests as it scans and copies your data, and these requests are billed to you separately (at standard S3 API rates). According to AWS, “in addition to the per GB-month charge for S3 backup, you will be charged for GET/LIST requests on your S3 objects and EventBridge events.” This means if you have a large number of small objects, the API requests during backup can result in a minor additional cost. For example, as a rough figure, S3 GET requests cost $0.0004 per 1,000 requests in the S3 Standard tier. If AWS Backup needs to issue, say, 100 million GET requests to back up a very large bucket, that could cost on the order of $40 (100 million / 1,000 * $0.0004) for the GET requests. In one AWS example scenario, backing up 100 million S3 objects (about 500 TB of data) incurred roughly $320 in GET request charges (this assumed ~8 GET requests per object, and shows how requests can add up at huge scale). Similarly, LIST requests (used to enumerate objects in buckets) are charged (about $0.005 per 1,000 in S3 Standard), though AWS Backup optimizes this by using inventory reports when possible. Additionally, AWS Backup relies on Amazon EventBridge to track changes for continuous backups of S3 – those EventBridge events have a cost (EventBridge charges $1 per million events). If you have a very high change rate (millions of new or modified S3 objects), the event notifications could add a few dollars to your monthly bill. For most users, the S3 API and event costs will be relatively small compared to the storage cost – but it’s good to be aware of them, especially if you’re backing up millions of small files.

Restore costs

Restoring S3 data from AWS Backup will incur a data retrieval charge (per GB) just like other services. Expect about $0.02 per GB restored for S3 backups (same as EFS, etc., for warm tier). Additionally, when AWS Backup restores objects to S3, it will perform PUT requests to write those objects back into your S3 bucket. Those PUT requests are billed at standard S3 rates (around $0.005 per 1,000 puts). AWS notes this as well: when restoring S3 backups, you’ll be charged for PUT requests for the restored data. So if you restored, say, 1 million objects, that’s 1 million PUTs (about $0.05 at S3’s rate). In short: the aws s3 backup pricing model is storage (per GB-month) + backup API requests (GET/LIST/events) + restore (per GB + PUT requests).

Example: Imagine you use AWS Backup to protect a 1 TB S3 bucket containing 10 million objects (average object size 100 KB, lots of small files). For one month of retention, the storage cost would be ~1,000 GB * $0.05 = $50. The backup job might issue roughly 10 million GET requests (to read each object once), which at $0.0004/1k requests is about $4 in GET costs (plus a smaller amount for LIST requests). If you have continuous backup enabled, the EventBridge stream of object changes might be, say, 1 million events/month (another $1). So your total backup cost for that month is around $55. If you then restore a subset of that data – suppose 100 GB worth (10% of the bucket) – you’d pay 100 GB * $0.02 = $2 for data restore, plus perhaps 1 million PUT requests (if that 100 GB consisted of many small files) which is another ~$0.05. All together, the restore operation might cost ~$2.05. As you can see, the storage cost is the dominant factor; the request-based charges are noticeable mostly when dealing with huge numbers of objects or extremely frequent changes.

If you’d like a refresher on how S3 storage classes and native pricing work, see our companion post “The Ultimate Guide to Amazon S3 Pricing 2025.”

AWS Backup Vault Pricing (and Vaults vs. Storage)

When you use AWS Backup, your recovery points are stored in backup vaults. A vault is essentially a logical container for backups. The good news is that vaults themselves do not incur any direct charges. You can create multiple backup vaults (to organize backups by environment, application, or to use the new Vault Lock feature) and AWS doesn’t charge for having vaults. Costs are driven by the storage inside and data transferred, as discussed. In other words, “AWS Backup Vault pricing” is just the pricing of the backups you store in the vault.

There are a couple of nuances to mention about vaults:

• Cross-account vaults: You might use AWS Backup to copy backups to a vault in another AWS account (for security isolation). If it’s the same region, there’s no data transfer fee for cross-account copies (since data isn’t leaving the region). The sending account will mark the backup copy as complete and the receiving account just pays for the storage. If it’s cross-account and cross-region, then the cross-region data transfer fee applies as described earlier. But again, there is no extra surcharge simply for using a different account’s vault.
• Logically air-gapped vaults: AWS Backup introduced a feature called logically air-gapped vaults (a type of vault that is WORM-protected and isolated to prevent tampering, often used for ransomware protection). These specialized vaults have the same storage pricing as standard vaults. During the preview, AWS didn’t charge extra for using them, and now that they’re generally available, the stored data is billed at normal backup storage rates. One thing to note: if you move backups into a logically air-gapped vault, certain free-tier benefits or service-specific discounts might not apply. For example, AWS documentation notes that backup storage free allowances (like the RDS 100% free quota, or any free snapshot storage promotions for EBS) are not considered when data is in a logically air-gapped vault. Essentially, because these vaults are meant for immutable copies, AWS treats them separately for billing. This is a fine point, and for most users it won’t make a big difference unless you were relying on a free tier promotion.

To summarize aws backup vault pricing: you don’t pay for vaults themselves – only for the storage, data transfer, and retrieval of backups in those vaults. You can use multiple vaults (and Vault Lock, etc.) for better governance without fear of extra “vault fees.” Just be mindful that copying data into any vault (especially across regions) will incur the normal storage and transfer costs as described.

Using the AWS Backup Pricing Calculator: Example Scenarios

AWS offers a dedicated AWS Pricing Calculator for Backup. Simply pick your region, choose which resource types you’ll back up (EFS, RDS, S3, EBS, and so on), then enter your storage size and retention period. Below, we’ll walk through three example scenarios—small, medium, and large—to show how those inputs translate into monthly cost estimates and how to interpret the results.

Example 1: Small-Scale Backup

Scenario: You have a small application with a single Amazon EBS volume of 100 GB. You use AWS Backup to take a daily backup, retaining each backup for 30 days. Assume about 5% of the data changes each day (5 GB of daily incremental changes). You occasionally might restore a file or two, but let’s say in a typical month you restore just 5 GB of data.

• Storage: The first backup is a full 100 GB. Over the month, daily changes of ~5 GB mean each day’s incremental backup adds 5 GB. By day 30, you have roughly 100 GB + 29×5 GB = 245 GB of backup data stored (spread across all the recovery points). The average storage used throughout the month is slightly lower (because the month starts with less), but to keep it simple, let’s estimate ~200 GB-month of storage on average. At the EBS warm storage rate of $0.05 per GB-month, this comes out to $10.00 per month for backup storage. (If we calculate precisely using AWS’s formula: 600 GB-month as in their example for a similar pattern would be $30 at $0.05/GB-month, but our usage is smaller. Our 200 GB-month estimate would be $10.)
• Data Restore: We assumed 5 GB restored during the month (perhaps you needed to recover a few files or volumes totaling 5 GB). Restore data is charged at about $0.02 per GB, so 5 GB * $0.02 = $0.10.
• Data Transfer: All backups are kept in the same region (no cross-region copies), so $0 transfer costs. Within the same region, moving data into the backup vault doesn’t incur a separate fee.
• Backup Evaluations: If you’re not using Backup Audit Manager, then $0. (Even if you were, say you did 30 evaluations, that would be 30 * $0.00125 = 3.75 cents.)

Adding those up, the total monthly AWS Backup cost is roughly $10.10. In practice, the AWS Pricing Calculator might show a figure around the $10–$12 range for this scenario. This is a very affordable backup solution for a 100 GB volume – roughly 10% of the cost of the storage itself (for comparison, 100 GB of EBS General Purpose storage costs $10 per month at $0.10/GB-month). It demonstrates that AWS Backup (using EBS snapshots under the hood) is quite cost-effective for small data sizes.

Example 2: Medium-Scale Backup (Cross-Region DR)

Scenario: Consider a mid-sized business running several workloads. Suppose across your systems you have about 5 TB of data: for example, 3 TB in Amazon EFS file systems and 2 TB in RDS databases. You use AWS Backup to do daily backups of all this data with a 30-day retention. Let’s assume a 5% daily change rate on the EFS data (150 GB changed daily) and maybe 2% on the databases (40 GB changed daily), just for estimation. Additionally, you copy all backups to a second region for disaster recovery. We’ll use US East (N. Virginia) as the primary region and EU (Ireland) as the DR region in this example.

• Storage (primary region): The EFS backups in the primary region: initial full 3 TB, plus incrementals. Roughly, 3 TB + (29 * 150 GB) = ~7.35 TB of data in backups by end of month. The average might be around 5 TB-month over the month. For RDS, if we assume the automated free backup covers 2 TB, we might not pay for the first 2 TB of those backups – but let’s assume we retain some additional snapshots beyond the free window, say an extra 0.5 TB-month on average of charged storage. So primary region total backup storage ~5.5 TB-month that is billable. At N. Virginia rates, we’ll estimate around $0.05 per GB-month for EFS and $0.095 per GB-month for the portion of RDS beyond free. That cost would be approximately (5000 GB * $0.05) + (500 GB * $0.095) = $250 + $47.50 ≈ $297.50 for the month in the primary region. (If RDS backups were within the free allowance, that $47 could be $0.)
• Storage (DR region): All backups are copied to EU (Ireland). The data amount is similar – about 5.5 TB-month on average in that region’s vault. Ireland’s storage rates are a bit higher than Virginia; let’s approximate $0.06 per GB-month for this mix. So 5,500 GB * $0.06 ≈ $330 for the month in the DR region.
• Cross-Region Transfer: Each day, new backup data is being transferred from US East to EU. We estimated ~190 GB of new backup data per day (150 GB EFS + 40 GB RDS changes). Over 30 days that’s ~5.7 TB transferred. Inter-region data transfer from US to EU might cost on the order of $0.02–$0.05 per GB; let’s use $0.04/GB as a midpoint. That yields about 5,700 GB * $0.04 = $228 in data transfer charges for the month (billed on the US side).
• Restore: In a typical month, you might not perform a large-scale restore. But let’s say you do a disaster recovery drill once in the DR region, restoring 1 TB of data from backups to verify everything. 1,000 GB * $0.02 = $20 in restore charges (billed in the EU region for the data retrieved). And if you restored some portion in the primary region as well, you’d have similar charges. (EFS file restore is $0.02/GB; RDS snapshot restore to a new instance doesn’t have a direct fee but starting up the instance would incur RDS instance charges.)

Add it up: Primary ~$297.50 + DR ~$330 + transfer ~$228 + restore ~$20 = about $875 for the month. If RDS was fully covered by free tier, that could drop closer to ~$800. Using the AWS Pricing Calculator, you would plug in 5.5 TB storage in one region, 5.5 TB in another, and ~5.7 TB of cross-region data transfer, plus any restore. The calculator might show an estimate on the order of $800–$900 per month for this setup.

This scenario shows how costs grow with data size and especially with cross-region replication. Here, about half the cost was storage in each region, and a significant portion (~25%) was data transfer. If budget is a concern, you might decide to replicate only critical subsets of data to a DR region to cut transfer and storage costs in half. On the other hand, for 5 TB of data under robust protection (two regions, 30 days retention), around $800/month may be quite acceptable from a business continuity standpoint.

Example 3: Large-Scale Backup (Enterprise Data Lake)

Scenario: A large enterprise is using AWS Backup to protect a huge data lake and other critical data. Let’s say there is 500 TB of data in total. This includes, for instance, an Amazon S3 bucket with 400–500 TB of data (hundreds of millions of objects), plus additional EBS volumes and databases making up another 50–100 TB. We’ll focus on the S3 part since it’s the largest. We’ll assume one region (to keep it simpler, no cross-region copy here, though an enterprise might also do that).

• Storage: 500 TB = 500,000 GB of backup storage. At around $0.05 per GB-month, storing 500 TB of backups costs roughly $25,000 per month. (In reality, S3’s cost on its own might be cheaper per GB for infrequently accessed storage classes, but AWS Backup’s flat rate for the backup vault is roughly in this range. If some of this data could be moved to cold storage, that could potentially cut costs by ~80%, but assume it’s all warm in this scenario.)
• Requests overhead: Backing up that S3 data might involve scanning, say, 200 million objects. AWS Backup would utilize S3 Inventory and batch operations to optimize, but let’s suppose it effectively needs on the order of 100 million GET requests and a smaller number of LIST requests over the month. As mentioned, 100 million GET requests in S3 Standard cost about $40 (it could be a bit more if each object requires multiple API calls). The AWS example for a similar scale (500 TB, 100 million+ objects) showed around $320 in GET request costs (they assumed 8 GET calls per object in the worst case). There might also be a nominal charge for EventBridge events if continuous backup is tracking changes (say $10–$20 for tens of millions of events). So, API and event costs might be on the order of a few hundred dollars in this scenario – comparatively small next to the tens of thousands for storage, but not negligible.
• Restore: If a large-scale recovery were needed – for example, restoring 10 TB of data from that backup – the restore data charge at $0.02/GB would be $0.02 * 10,000 GB = $200. Plus, S3 PUT requests to write those restored objects back (if that 10 TB consisted of 50 million objects, that’s about $250 in PUT request costs). For a one-time large restore, you might spend a few hundred dollars to get the data back. Typically, though, restores are much smaller than the total dataset (you might only restore certain subsets or only in disaster scenarios).

Given these numbers, the monthly AWS Backup cost for 500 TB could be in the ~$25k–$26k range (mostly storage). The AWS Pricing Calculator can certainly handle an input of 500,000 GB of backup storage – it would straightforwardly calculate around $25k for the storage, and you’d manually factor in an estimate for request costs since those might not be prominent in the calculator interface (they might be rolled into an “AWS Backup for S3” line item if available). The key takeaway is that at large scales, backup costs become a significant line item – but they are still linear and predictable. Even hundreds of terabytes can be protected in AWS without any surprise fees; you just pay per GB and per request as we’ve outlined. Many enterprises find this cost acceptable given the value of the data – and often, storing long-term backups in AWS is cheaper than doing so on-premises when you consider infrastructure and maintenance. Of course, with such large data sets, you’d also explore cost-saving measures like using cold storage for older backups, tuning retention (e.g., maybe you don’t need 30 daily copies of a 500 TB dataset), and ensuring you’re not needlessly backing up data that’s already stored in durable, redundant forms.

Tip: Whatever the scale, it’s a good practice to use the AWS Pricing Calculator or AWS Cost Explorer to model your backup costs. Enter your expected GB of backups, your retention period, how much data you might restore or copy across regions, etc. The calculator will give you a monthly estimate that you can tweak by adjusting assumptions (e.g., what if we only retain 14 days instead of 30? What if we enable cold storage after 90 days?). AWS Backup’s pay-as-you-go pricing means you have flexibility – you can always start with higher retention for safety and then drop older backups to reduce costs once you’re comfortable. Monitoring your AWS Backup billing in Cost Explorer can also help spot if your change rates or data volumes are higher than expected, so you can adjust accordingly.

Conclusion

By understanding these pricing details and best practices, you can confidently use AWS Backup to protect your data without breaking the bank. AWS Backup’s model is straightforward once you break it down: storage (GB-months), data moved (GB out or restored), and a few per-request or per-check charges. By leveraging features like lifecycle policies (warm to cold storage) and free allowances (like RDS’s free backup storage), you can optimize costs. And since it’s fully managed, you spend less time on operational overhead while only paying for actual usage.

Hopefully this guide to AWS Backup pricing has demystified the costs. With careful planning, you can design a backup strategy that meets your business needs and stays within budget – taking advantage of AWS’s cloud scale and pay-as-you-go efficiency for all your backup and recovery needs.

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Monitor real-time usage and performance metrics across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Quickly identify inefficiencies and make proactive adjustments, enhancing your infrastructure.

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Take advantage of Cloudchipr’s on-demand, certified DevOps team that eliminates the hiring hassles and off-boarding worries. This service provides accelerated Day 1 setup through infrastructure as code, automated deployment pipelines, and robust monitoring. On Day 2, it ensures continuous operation with 24/7 support, proactive incident management, and tailored solutions to suit your organization’s unique needs. Integrating this service means you get the expertise needed to optimize not only your cloud costs but also your overall operational agility and resilience.

Experience the advantages of integrated multi-cloud management and proactive cost optimization by signing up for a 14-day free trial today, no hidden charges, no commitments.