I'm relatively new to AWS and I'm struggling to understand how companies manage their backup systems. We currently store about 1TB of customer files on our servers, and since we're not using S3 right now, our backups are cost-free. However, we're considering moving to S3 because our current hosting has its limits. The problem is, if we put that 1TB on S3 and want to perform daily full backups, the cost would skyrocket at $0.09 per GB. Am I misunderstanding something? Should we avoid storing backups elsewhere? I've always been told about the 3-2-1 backup rule, but it seems unmanageable in this case. How do you all approach your backup strategies?
2 Answers
You're right that egress costs can pile up quickly; it's $0.09 per GB when you're pulling data out of S3, but remember that uploading data (ingress) is free. So, if you're transferring 1TB initially, you won’t incur a cost when moving that data to S3. It's important to only transfer data out when absolutely necessary. Ideally, you won’t be pulling all your data out every day—just incremental changes would be much more economical. Consider using S3's versioning to help with backup management without incurring hefty costs.
When it comes to S3, it's all about understanding how it works with data transfer and storage costs. Launching your backups with regular syncs might be the way to go rather than full backups every single day. Plus, have a look into S3’s lifecycle management—it can help you manage costs by automatically transitioning older backups to cheaper storage tiers or deleting them when they're no longer needed. There are also different storage classes in S3 you can use to lower expenses for infrequently accessed data. Just be sure you're familiar with IAM settings to keep your data secure.
Those are great tips! I didn't realize there were different storage tiers. Do you think we could realistically set up a mixed strategy using both regular syncs and lifecycle rules?
Thanks for clarifying that! We're trying to figure out if we should just skip making daily full backups and instead focus on nightly incremental backups. Does that sound like a smart route?