Backups & Snapshots

Snapshots protect you from your own mistakes. Backups protect you from losing the platform, even when the provider is part of the incident.

Flat per-terabyte pricing, billed only on compressed data. All prices in EUR.

Backup vs Snapshot Pricing Examples How it works

Two kinds of recovery

A snapshot is operational recovery: a fast rollback when you break something yourself, a bad migration or a wrong command, restored inside the cluster in minutes. A backup is disaster recovery: an encrypted copy living off the cluster that survives losing the disk, the node, the whole cluster, even the provider. Most setups want both: snapshots for the everyday mistakes, backups for the day the infrastructure itself is the incident.

You pay for compressed data, not disk size.

Example: a 100 GB disk with 20 GB used compresses to roughly 12-15 GB. You are billed only for that compressed size, not for the 100 GB disk.

Backup

Disaster recovery.

Encrypted copy living off the cluster, on another provider and in another country.

Survives provider failure. Recoverable without ServersCamp.

€35 /TB per month

€0.035 per GB, compressed

Snapshot

Operational recovery.

Point-in-time full disk copy on the same SDS cluster, three live replicas.

Rolls back your own mistakes in minutes. Same failure domain, so not DR on its own.

€50 /TB per month

€0.05 per GB, compressed

Billed monthly, prorated by the hour. You are charged for the compressed size each hour a backup or snapshot exists, summed across the month. Delete it and billing stops at the next hour.

Both snapshots and backups restore into something new. Turn either one into a fresh disk to spin up a new server, or attach it as a cloud volume, without touching the original.

What each one survives

A snapshot lives in the same failure domain as your VM. A backup lives outside it. That is the whole difference.

Failure Snapshot Backup
Bad migration✓✓
Deleted file✓✓
Dead disk✓✓
Dead node✓✓
Dead cluster✗✓
Dead datacenter✗✓
Locked account✗✓
Provider unavailable✗✓

Same data. Two very different failure domains.

Backup vs snapshot. A snapshot costs more because it lives on premium replicated cluster storage; a backup is compressed and shipped to cheaper object storage off the cluster.

Backup Snapshot
Failure domain Independent provider Same SDS cluster
Price per TB / month €35
compressed object storage		 €50
premium replicated storage
Price per GB / month €0.035 €0.05
Billed on Compressed size Compressed size
Where it lives Another provider.
Another country.
Your key.		 Same SDS cluster, three live replicas
Survives Cluster, region and provider failure Disk, node and hypervisor failure
Restore speed Slower: data is pulled back and decrypted Fast: rollback inside the cluster
Best for Disaster recovery Operational recovery

Not sure which one you need? Read Snapshots & Backups in the docs, or the blog post Most people think they have backups →

Example monthly cost

Per compressed gigabyte held for a full month. Small disks cost cents.

A typical 20 GB VM costs about €0.70 a month: full disaster recovery, off-cluster and encrypted with your key.

Compressed size Backup, €0.035/GB Snapshot, €0.05/GB
5 GB€0.18€0.25
10 GB€0.35€0.50
20 GB€0.70€1.00
50 GB€1.75€2.50
100 GB€3.50€5.00
250 GB€8.75€12.50
500 GB€17.50€25.00
1 TB€35.00€50.00

What a single backup costs

Billing is hourly, so you only pay while a backup exists. Take a 20 GB nightly backup and the cost depends on how long you keep it.

Kept 1 day

20 GB, one night

€0.02

Kept 3 days

20 GB, default retention

€0.07

Kept 1 week

20 GB, weekly point

€0.16

Kept 1 month

20 GB, full month

€0.70

A single small backup costs a couple of cents. Even a full GFS retention chain (daily, weekly, monthly points) of a 20 GB VM lands around €1 to €2 per month, because only the compressed bytes you actually keep are billed.

Every backup is disaster recovery

No local-only backups, no hidden tiers. One flat price, compressed, off-cluster, encrypted with your key.

Read how it works Read why it matters