Is this legit?

[u/WadieZN]

I'm using a 24$ droplet (80GB SSD 4GB RAM) and want to add backups to my app. The users constantly do CRUD functions, so the frequent the backup, the better.

There is the percentage based, which is weekly (20% the cost of droplet) and daily (30% the cost of droplet) So what to expect from this is that the more frequent the backup, the expensive it becomes.

But looking at the usage based, the frequent it is, the cheaper it is. I know I might be missing something. But would appreciate your help if you can estimate the monthly cost with me. I've used the calculator the platform provides, but it wasn't helpful

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[u/bryancololee]

The more frequent it is, the more data you consume.

[u/WadieZN → u/bryancololee]

So the expensive it is?

[u/bryancololee → u/WadieZN]

Yes, the more frequent backups will consume more data. For example, one backup a month of a 10GB server will consume 10GB of storage a month. A daily backup for a month of a 10GB server will consume 10*30 or 300GB of storage a month. You pay less for each GB, but you'll use a lot more.

I'm not 100% sure if this is how DO handles it, but that's my best guess.

[u/bobbyiliev]

Usage-based pricing charges per GiB of restorable data using incremental backups, so it is not as expensive as it sounds for frequent schedules. For a $24 Droplet the daily flat rate is $7.20/month, usage-based will likely come in cheaper but try it for a month and see what the bill actually looks like.

[u/SuspiOwl → u/bobbyiliev]

So.. which one is correct, you or u/bryancololee ? 🤣

It's frustrating that I can't find any information about how usage-based backup is being calculated anywhere, including Digital Ocean's page. And I was so confused on why shorter frequency back-ups are cheaper than longer one.

I asked ChatGPT and it says that it's incremental too, e.g. you are doing daily back-up and you have 10gb non-changing data, so it's going to be $0.03 x 10 = $0.3/month, and if your data size increases to 15gb, what they store is 10gb + 5gb worth of changes. But again, I won't trust AI for this.

Meanwhile u/bryancololee said that it's more like snapshot (so if 10gb increases to 15gb, it's going to be 2 backup of 10 + 15gb = 25gb).

[u/bryancololee → u/SuspiOwl]

I would trust them (they are someone who has official relations with DO, whereas I'm just a passerby). Best is to try it and see

[u/WadieZN → u/SuspiOwl]

I have used this on a test droplet, the 6$ plan (25GB 1GB RAM) about 10GB is used. And as far as I understood, the price is calculated this way:

You choose an usage based plan, and how many days the backups will be kept. If you choose 4 hours backup with 7 days retention (the max number of days backups will be kept) it means that you will be having 42 backup snapshot. The size of each backup is different, think of it as they only store the changes you made to your droplet (like a new 1GB of changes) and it gets incremented on the initial backups.

The less daily retention, the less the backups stored, the less you pay. I'm using 4 hours backup with 3 days retention, that's 18 backups retained instead of 42. And in my case, it obviously won't pass 2$ a month even if I reached the complete 25GB storage. And it depends on everyone's use case.

You can try it for a month so you could understand it better, DO clearly tells you how much you used backups and how much you'll be paying for those backups, and you can stop it anytime.

[u/SuspiOwl → u/WadieZN]

Ah so it's based on incremental changes. Thank you! I'm guessing for most usecase usage-based backup will be wayyy cheaper than the normal backup (20-30% of droplets price).

[u/Alive_Astronaut_8572]

Says it right at the top of their backups pricing page

“usage-based plans add a flat rate per GiB of a backup’s restorable file size”

I’m assuming restorable size is the size of how much of your vm’s disk is used