You Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Verify Your Backups

This article is part of our ongoing series about the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud storage. It examines how fees for API requests and data retrieval contribute to data backup cost. 

Data backups are living, breathing, digital entities. Depending on your backup software and other factors, you might be verifying your backup and checking its metadata every week. These activities are important to the health of your overall backup strategy, but they can also complicate your budget. That's because when you verify, test, or access your backup data, you get hit with all sorts of hard-to-predict charges for API requests, transport, and other data retrieval fees that can wreak havoc on your total backup costs.  

The new reality: backups are active data 

Traditionally, backups were treated as passive insurance—stored away and only retrieved in emergencies. Today, however, businesses are accessing and testing their backups more frequently due to several key factors: 

• Ransomware and cyber threats – With cyber attacks on the rise, companies regularly verify and restore backups to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime in case of an attack. This process is also necessary to confirm that attackers have not compromised backed-up data, which is common in sophisticated attacks. 

• Compliance and audits – Regulations increasingly require organizations to demonstrate data recoverability, leading to more frequent backup testing and retrieval. 

• Disaster recovery readiness – Businesses are implementing continuous data protection (CDP) and proactive disaster recovery drills to ensure they can recover quickly from outages or system failures, and to ensure runbooks are accurate and up to date. 

• Data analytics and AI – Some organizations are leveraging backup data for insights, training AI models, or extracting historical trends, making backups more than just a last resort. Increasingly, backup copies serve as an accessible source of analytics data as they don’t impact performance of primary systems. 

Backup software does not work on the basis of “set it and forget it”  

Popular backup software solutions such as Veeam, Rubrik, and Commvault don’t just upload data, they regularly verify backups and perform metadata checks to ensure the data’s integrity. Each of these processes requires API operations, specifically: 

• Regularly verifying backups—requires the backup software to LIST objects in your bucket to ensure that every backup file is still there. This process creates a LIST API request for each object. 

• Perform metadata checks—requires a HEAD object requests to check timestamps or version details. These tend to be run frequently.  

What the API requests can cost you 

The major cloud platforms charge you for API requests. Though the charges appear small—just fractions of a penny per operation—these fees can radically alter your backup budget. As many organizations test and validate their backups weekly or biweekly, amounting to four to eight additional full checks per month, the fees for LIST and HEAD requests can add up quickly. In some cases, depending on your AWS tier and your data usage, these fees can more than double your total data backup cost.  

And, if you want to retrieve your data… 

As modern backup workflows shift from reactive recovery to more active cyber protection and prevention, businesses need storage solutions that allow seamless, cost-effective access—without hidden retrieval or egress fees. The major cloud platforms charge for data egress; if you want to retrieve your data, you’re going to pay. While all AWS tiers carry egress fees, the additional cost of data retrieval requests and data access requests enforced by some AWS tiers can range from 50% to 90% of your total cost of ownership! 

Assumes 20% egress per year

The Wasabi solution 

Wasabi takes a different approach that drives lower data backup costs. By not charging for API requests, egress, data access, or retrieval fees, Wasabi can handle regular backup tests at high volumes at rates far below AWS. With Wasabi, you’re free to validate backups and run recovery scenarios at no additional cost so you can be the most prepared you can be. You can expect flat fees, consistent performance, and a predictable storage bill at the end of every month.  

Regardless of your use case, we believe you shouldn’t have to pay extra to access your own data, and that taking necessary security measures should be encouraged by your cloud storage provider, not taxed. Of course, fees in cloud storage affect far more than just backup. For a deep dive into the pervasive problem of cloud storage fees on organizations of all sizes, download our free eBook, Demystifying Cloud Object Storage Costs.