Backup and disaster recovery
Each provider is profiled from its own pricing page, with the source recorded against every figure. Two of these sell you storage to push backups into, two sell you the job that does the pushing, and one is a control plane for a single cloud — so the column that matters is not the price but what the price counts.
Backup and DR
| Provider | Entry paid plan | Storage price | What is metered |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Backup | None. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, so the smallest possible bill is the cost of whatever is actually stored — the only member of this category without a floor to clear. | $0.05 per GB-month warm and $0.01 per GB-month cold, for EFS in us-east-1. The rate is per protected service rather than universal — EBS, RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB each carry their own — so this is one row of a table, not a headline price. | Pure consumption, with no plan and no floor: backup storage held, cross-region transfer, data restored, and backup evaluations. Nothing is bought in advance, which is the opposite end of the category from the job-count and resource-count plans. |
| BorgBase | $2 a month, sold as $24 a year billed annually for the Small plan, which includes 250 GB and 10 repositories. | $0.01 per GB per month beyond the 250 GB included on Small, falling to $7 per TB per month on Medium — the same unit quoted two ways, which works out cheaper per gigabyte on the larger plan. | Per gigabyte stored AFTER compression and deduplication, which is the distinction from every other per-GB vendor here: Borg deduplicates client-side, so the billed quantity is smaller than the data protected and there is no separate charge for the transfer that produced it. |
| rsync.net | No plan fee. The floor is an 800 GB minimum order at 1.5 cents per GB per month; the page states the minimum and the rate separately and does not multiply them out. | 1.5 cents per GB per month up to 9 TB, falling to 1.25 cents from 10 TB and 0.75 cents from 100 TB. Priced in cents rather than dollars, which is the unit the page uses throughout. | Per gigabyte held, per month, tiered by total volume with no contract. The same features are offered at every tier and at every location — what a larger commitment buys is a lower rate, longer snapshot retention, physical media shipment and integration engineering, not a different product. |
| SimpleBackups | $49 a month for Lite, which includes 5 backup jobs, 50 GB of storage and a floor of 12 hours between runs. | Not documented | Per backup job, in plan-sized blocks of 1, 5, 20 and 100, with storage included at each step and unlimited bring-your-own storage alongside it. The tier also sets how often a job may run — 12 hours, 1 hour, then 5 minutes — so the plan buys recovery point objective as much as it buys capacity. |
| SnapShooter | $14 a month for Lite, covering up to 3 backup resources with 10 GB of included storage and daily runs. | Not documented | Per backup resource — 3, 20, 50, then 250 — with included storage at each step and unlimited bring-your-own storage throughout. As with SimpleBackups the tier also buys frequency, from daily to twice daily to every 5 minutes, so the plan is really priced on how much you protect and how recently. |
Which to consider
Backing up AWS services from one console with nothing bought in advance. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, and the rate is per GB-month per service, so a small estate genuinely pays a small bill.
Paying for what survives compression and deduplication rather than for what you sent. Borg deduplicates client-side under a key BorgBase never holds, so the bill and the blast radius of a breach are both smaller than the data being protected.
Holding a lot of data cheaply and reading it back for nothing: 1.5 cents per GB a month, falling to 0.75 cents above 100 TB, with no egress charge on a restore and unlimited email and phone support at every size.
Backing up many different things on a schedule you choose and being told when one stops working: 5 jobs at $49 a month rising to 100 at $299, with unlimited storage of your own alongside whatever the plan includes.
Protecting a handful of servers or DigitalOcean resources without paying for a platform: $14 a month covers three, with daily runs, 10 GB included and unlimited bring-your-own storage on every tier including the free one.