# AWS Backup

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/backup/aws-backup/

A central control plane for backing up AWS services, billed per GB-month of backup storage with no plan.

## Who it suits

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.

Consider something else if Your estate is not all AWS, or disaster recovery means a copy in another region. Cross-region transfer is billed as its own line where rsync.net and BorgBase charge nothing to move data at all, and anything moved to cold storage is committed for 90 days whether you keep it or not.

## iScore

91 / 100 (80% interval 87–95), rank 1 of 5 in backup — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every backup peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/backup/aws-backup/alternatives/

- Price: 82 (75–88), weight 36%, 1 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: minimum_paid_price
- Capabilities: 100 (94–100), weight 29%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: mfa
- Trust and compliance: 89 (70–100), weight 21%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: gdpr_data_residency, pci_dss, soc2
- Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- What the free plan includes: Backup storage free tiers exist for EBS, DocumentDB and Neptune. The pricing page names them only in passing, to say they do not apply inside a logically air-gapped vault, and never states how large they are — so the allowance is confirmed to exist here and its size is not sourced from here. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: 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. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: 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. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Egress over allowance: Charged. Backup data transferred between AWS Regions is billed as its own line, so cross-region copies — the thing that makes a backup a disaster recovery plan — are not free the way they are at rsync.net and BorgBase. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)

### Storage

- Storage price: $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. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSBackup/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-15)
- Minimum storage duration: 90 days for anything moved to cold storage. Deleting earlier still bills the remaining days, so cold storage is a commitment rather than a cheaper shelf. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)

### Compliance

- HIPAA: Yes. AWS Backup is named on the HIPAA Eligible Services Reference, the list of services that may handle protected health information under the AWS Business Associate Addendum. Eligibility is per-service rather than account-wide, so the list is the thing to check. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/), read 2026-09-15)
- Encryption at rest: Yes, and independently of the source: a backup can carry a different encryption method from the resource it was taken from, so an unencrypted volume can still produce an encrypted recovery point. Only resource types supporting full AWS Backup management get this; others inherit the source resource encryption. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/encryption.html), read 2026-09-15)
- Customer-managed keys: Yes, through KMS. The key is configured on the backup vault rather than per backup, so the vault is the unit of key control — which also means moving a backup between vaults changes which key protects it. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/encryption.html), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [AWS Backup vs rsync.net](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-backup-vs-rsync-net/)
- [AWS Backup vs BorgBase](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-backup-vs-borgbase/)
- [AWS Backup vs SimpleBackups](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-backup-vs-simplebackups/)
- [AWS Backup vs SnapShooter](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-backup-vs-snapshooter/)