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  3. How much does AWS S3 cost if we choose to backup Google Workspace data to Amazon AWS S3 storage?

How much does AWS S3 cost if we choose to backup Google Workspace data to Amazon AWS S3 storage?

S3 pricing

If you choose to store your backup data in an AWS S3 bucket, you may need to include the separate cost for S3 storage. By default, CubeBackup employs S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage class. Based on our statistical data, the average cost of S3 cloud storage is about $0.013/GB/Month ($13/TB/Month).

CubeBackup also supports other storage classes including Standard, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval and Intelligent-Tiering in the initial configuration or during data migration. For detailed information about S3 pricing for different storage classes, please refer to this doc.

Here is additional detailed pricing information for Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi and Backblaze B2. By default, CubeBackup employs Coldline as the storage class in Google Cloud (about $4/TB/Month) and Cool as the access tier in Azure Blob (about $10/TB/Month).

Try our CubeBackup Pricing Calculator to estimate the total cost of your backup solutions on different platforms.

Considerations

  • CubeBackup employs incremental backups. After the first backup, only new or modified data is retrieved from the Google cloud. So, subsequent backups should not take up a lot of storage space.

  • During the first month, the cost of S3 may be 2 or 3 times higher than expected ($0.013/GB/Month). This is because Amazon AWS charges for S3 API requests, and CubeBackup may generate a large number of AWS S3 API requests during the initial backup. However, after this initial backup, subsequent backups are incremental so that only new or modified data will be uploaded to the S3 bucket, and therefore your S3 costs should stabilize at about $0.013/GB/Month.

  • Google Docs native files, like documents and spreadsheets, take up no space on Google Drive, but they do take up space when exported to backup storage. Gmail attachments will be downloaded with BASE64 encoding, which makes the backup files approximately 37% larger than their binary format. Thus, the space of Google Workspace backups may be 30%-40% larger than their size in the Google cloud.

  • CubeBackup supports backing up to S3-compatible storage services like Wasabi and Backblaze B2, which are often more affordable options than AWS S3. However, based on our testing, the stability and throughput capabilities of S3-compatible storage services are a step below AWS S3. Please use at your own risk.