New Azure backup pricing

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo

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28 Dec 2003
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Can anyone explain this to me in words that actually make sense?

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/backup/

The first bit seems relatively straightforward - circa £6 a month for each 500GB threshold. What I can't fathom is what they're on about with the prorated bit.

Potentially looking at using it with a DPM server as another level of backup. Whilst the DPM is continually protecting all the other servers, the idea is that it would backup some of this to Azure at weekly or even monthly intervals. What does this mean for the pricing? The bit about prorated charges seems to suggest that, the less frequently I backup, the less I'll be charged, even if the total quantity of data stored is the same?

Confused!
 
I can't load the page for some reason, but prorated stuff on Azure normally means that if you only store stuff for part of a month you don't pay the full amount, nothing more complicated than that.
 
Yeah that's what I'd have assumed but it seems to be talking about how frequently you perform backups, which seems irrelevant to me - surely it's based on how much storage you're using for your backups, regardless of how often you update them.
 
There's normally costs related to how much data you transfer to/from Azure, so the frequency of your backup jobs will affect the monthly bill.
 
Seems pretty simple, basically if you're using the backup service, i.e. have backups/data on the azure servers, you pay for the time you're using the service. So if (as the FAQ states), you have 300gb of data stored for half the month, you'd be charged a pro-rata fee, plus a fee for the actual data stored, which is the Azure storage service (separate service, which has fees for transactions/outbound data etc) on top.
 
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See that's what I don't get, the FAQ doesn't seem clear. It says:

"if you consistently backed up a server instance with 300 GB of storage for the first half of the month"

What do they mean by "consistently backed up"? Are they referring to how frequently you update the backup or just the total amount stored? Are they saying you leave the 300GB there for the remainder of the month and just don't update it or that you actually delete the data?

What you're saying makes sense to me - payment based both on the total data stored plus the bandwidth used whilst updating it but there's no detail on this in the FAQ, just this flat rate per 500GB.

Maybe I'm just being slow but I don't understand.
 
The way I read it is they have now split backup charges into two things:

1) The backup service itself, which compresses your data before storing it
2) The storage itself

1) Costs £6.109 per 500GB block of data backed up. If you only backup 50GB in a given month, you will be charged £0.6109 for that month.
2) Costs whatever storage space you use, which obviously depends on how compressible the data was, how many copies and for how long you keep them.

Essentially they are charging you to compress/dedupe your data before storing it. Not sure why they aren't doing it at the client end, to avoid transmitting uncompressed data, but hey...

It's not cheap!

That's my interpretation, anyway.
 
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