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AWS Backup

iScore87–95 · #1/5
aws.amazon.com/backup · Backup and DR
SEPT 2026 audit

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

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Entry paid planNone. 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.
Free tierYes
CategoryBackup and DR

Updated 10 criteria comparedSources last checked

01.Evaluation guide

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.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria AWS Backup does not publish are not listed.

Pricing
5 criteria
Free tierYes
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Backup Pricing ↗

    “Backup storage free tiers for Amazon EBS, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Neptune are not considered when the storage is in logically air-gapped vault.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

What the free plan includesBackup 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.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Backup Pricing ↗

    “Backup storage free tiers for Amazon EBS, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Neptune are not considered”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Entry paid planNone. 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.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Backup Pricing ↗

    “There is no minimum fee and there are no setup charges.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Pricing modelPure 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.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Backup Pricing ↗

    “pay only for the backup storage you use, backup data transferred between AWS Regions, backup data you restore, and backup evaluations”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Egress over allowanceCharged. 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.
Sources (1) →
Storage
2 criteria
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.
Sources (1) →
Minimum storage duration90 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.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Backup Pricing ↗

    “Backups transitioned to cold storage must be retained for a minimum of 90 days.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Compliance
3 criteria
HIPAAYes. 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.
Sources (1) →
Encryption at restYes, 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.
Sources (1) →
Customer-managed keysYes, 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.
Sources (1) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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Compare AWS Backup withAll alternatives, ranked →
AWS Backup vs rsync.net
AWS Backup vs BorgBase
AWS Backup vs SimpleBackups
AWS Backup vs SnapShooter

Every page here is sourced and dated.