More and more backup vendors offers backup to the cloud storage. It's one of the features that VMware virtualization admins are looking for as it allows a DR solution at reduced costs. Especially for small shops where there is no need of a remote site with another host for replication (or backup). So Cloud Backup Costs Estimate is one of the first things you might be looking at, so you know the costs upfront, and present this to your boss.
You could probably read my article on solutions from Veeam's Cloud Edition or PHD Virtual's CloudHook. Also smaller vendors (by size) like Trilead are working towards the same goal – backup/restore to and from the cloud.
Cloud Backup Costs Estimate
If you would like very precise estimates of costs for Amazon S3 with taking into account the retention policies, you might want to have a look at an online estimator tool from Clearpath Solution Group.
This online estimator allows simulation of costs of cloud backups to Amazon S3 with possibility to specify how many:
- Daily backups you want to keep
- Weekly backups you want to keep
- Monthly backups you want to keep
You have the choice to enter the numbers and the UI automatically refreshes the costs and shows the capacity consumption with the size of the total storage that will be necessary.
At first you enter the size of your full backups, then the daily incrementals, and how many days per week do you perform backups. Then you can enter how many daily, weekly and monthly backups you want to keep.
The solution has other options and goodies. It can also simulate the move of those backups to Amazon Glacier, to reduce the costs even further (approximatively further down by 90%). You can specify how many of monthly backups you want to move to Amazon Glacier in order to reduce the costs.
You can connect to this tool through this link: https://www.clearpathsg.com/backup-AWS-S3-Calculator
Enjoy… -:)
Source: ClearPath Solution Group Blog
