Skeddly has announced it has launched a new EBS Snapshot Cost Calculator that allows users to estimate the amount they will be spending on EBS backups.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) backups are now essential, as they allow users to restore their EBS volumes in the event of disaster to prevent data loss. Many organizations have incorporated Amazon EBS backups into their disaster recovery strategies, and as with email and file backups, EBS backups are religiously performed on a daily basis.
The EBS backups are essentially incremental backups, where the first backup created is a full snapshot, with all subsequent backups only including changes since the previous backup was performed. However, in contrast to most incremental backups, should the initial full backup be deleted, it will still be possible to use any of the incremental backups to fully restore EBS volumes. It will not be possible to restore to the deleted EBS snapshot, but it is possible to restore to any of the others.
Naturally, creating these backups is not free of charge as users will be charged for storage space. Unfortunately, calculating the cost of these incremental EBS backups is not straightforward, as there are many factors that can influence cost. For instance, the amount of data that has changed since the last EBS snapshot was taken will influence cost, as will the extent to which data can be compressed. Amazon stores the backups in S3, and the amount that data can be compressed will naturally have an impact on the amount of space required.
However, the new Skeddly EBS Snapshot Cost Calculator providers users with an accurate estimate of their likely spend from creating daily EBS snapshots.
Users must enter the volume size in GB and the likely % daily data volume change (3% is typical) and the Skeddly EBS Snapshot Cost Calculator will estimate the amount of data saved over the course of a month. To get a cost estimate, users must enter in the region of the EBS snapshots, and a dollar value for the cost of those snapshots will be calculated.
The Cost Calculator can be used free of charge and will help users budget for their daily EBS snapshots.