I'm new to AWS and I'm trying to understand how companies handle backups without incurring crazy costs. We currently have 1TB of customer files on our servers, and we don't pay anything for backups right now. We're considering moving these files to S3 since we're hitting some limitations with our current hosting provider.
However, I'm concerned about the costs. For instance, if we had our data on S3 and wanted daily full backups, that could get incredibly expensive at $0.09 per GB. Am I missing something here? Should we be avoiding storing data externally? I've been told about the 3-2-1 backup rule, but it feels impossible to manage. How are others handling this?
4 Answers
You should definitely familiarize yourself with AWS's cost structure. Ingress is free, which is great for uploading data, but egress costs can add up when restoring backups. But if you don’t need to do full daily backups, using incremental backups or lifecycle management to automatically tag older backups to cheaper tiers can save a lot. And, don’t forget to enable versioning for additional accident protection without significantly inflating costs.
First off, remember that S3 is cloud storage, not something you "go on"; it's more about using buckets connected to your AWS account. Uploading data to S3 is free, but if you need it back down to your on-prem setup, that's when egress fees kick in. Also, consider S3's storage tiers; using lower-cost options for infrequently accessed backups could significantly decrease your costs. Just set up lifecycle rules to manage backups efficiently and you can keep costs manageable!
It sounds like you're on the right track! Syncing your files to S3 on a scheduled basis can work well, and you have options like bucket replication or versioning for additional safety. If you're just looking for basic redundancy, using versioning with lifecycle policies can keep costs low—around $24/month. Just be cautious with AWS; it can be tricky, so explore IAM setups and best practices before committing to it fully.
Egress from S3 does indeed cost $0.09 per GB in certain regions, but remember that transferring data into S3 (ingress) is free. So, if you're backing up your local data to S3, you won’t incur charges there.
But yeah, if you need to back up data from S3 to an external location, there will be costs involved. It's usually not smart to transfer all your data out daily. Instead, consider only transferring changes (differential backups) which would save you money. Avoiding unnecessary egress costs should definitely be part of your strategy when working with larger amounts of data in AWS.
Thanks for clarifying that! So if I understand correctly, we would only need to do a daily differential instead of full backups? How often would we ideally send those diffs to an external provider?