The verdict by situation
Judge backup storage on four things: price per TB, the cost of getting data back (egress and retrieval), minimum retention, and whether it can make backups immutable.
For a shortlist built around your own workloads and budget, try the free Backup Advisor.
Price per TB, egress and minimum retention
List prices as of October 2026, checked on each vendor's pricing page or price API. AWS is US East (N. Virginia), Azure is East US with locally redundant storage, Google Cloud is Iowa. "About" figures multiply the per-GB price by 1,000. Request fees and taxes are left out.
| Service | Storage per TB per month | Egress (download) | Minimum retention | Retrieval fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | $6.95 | Free up to 3x average stored data, then $0.01/GB | None | None |
| Wasabi (pay as you go) | $7.99 (1 TB minimum charge) | No fee while monthly egress stays at or below active storage | 90 days | None |
| Hetzner Object Storage | €6.49/month base includes 1 TB and 1 TB egress; extra €0.0087 per TB-hour | €1.00 per extra TB | None stated (hourly billing) | None |
| Storj (Standard) | $7 | $7 per TB | 30 days | None |
| Cloudflare R2 Standard | $0.015/GB (about $15) | Free | None | None |
| AWS S3 Standard | $0.023/GB (about $23) | $0.09/GB after 100 GB free a month | None | None |
| AWS S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.004/GB (about $4) | $0.09/GB | 90 days | $0.03/GB |
| AWS S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.0036/GB (about $3.60) | $0.09/GB | 90 days | $0.01/GB standard, bulk free |
| AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099/GB (about $1) | $0.09/GB | 180 days | $0.02/GB standard, $0.0025/GB bulk |
| Azure Blob Hot (LRS) | $0.0208/GB (about $21) | $0.087/GB after 100 GB free a month | None | None |
| Azure Blob Cool (LRS) | $0.0152/GB (about $15) | $0.087/GB | 30 days | $0.01/GB |
| Azure Blob Cold (LRS) | $0.0036/GB (about $3.60) | $0.087/GB | 90 days | $0.03/GB |
| Azure Blob Archive (LRS) | $0.00099/GB (about $1) | $0.087/GB | 180 days | $0.02/GB standard |
| Google Cloud Storage Standard | $0.02/GiB (about $20) | $0.12/GiB for the first 10 TiB | None | None |
| Google Cloud Storage Archive | $0.0012/GiB (about $1.20) | $0.12/GiB | 365 days | $0.05/GiB |
The backup-focused providers cluster around $7 or €6.49 per TB with cheap or free egress. Hyperscaler hot tiers cost about three times as much and charge $0.087 to $0.12 per GB to download. Archive tiers are the cheapest place to keep data and the slowest, dearest place to restore from. Hetzner prices exclude VAT, Storj has a $5 monthly minimum, and Wasabi may limit accounts that regularly exceed its free egress policy.
More on real bills: S3 vs B2 vs Wasabi: the real cost is getting your files back.
What one restore costs
Storage price is the number on the pricing page; restore cost is the number you meet on the worst day. Here is one month of keeping 2 TB of backups and one full 2 TB restore, at the October 2026 prices above, before request fees, tax and the small free storage allowances.
Deep Archive fits a copy you hope never to touch. For the copy you restore from, low-egress providers cost less and make test restores free.
Free tiers that are usable for backup
The Free Cloud Storage Tracker follows consumer drives with sourced plan sizes. For backup, a free plan needs room, a way for a backup tool to reach it (usually rclone) and no surprise deletion. These come closest, as of October 2026.
Each provider has its own page with sources and history: MEGA, Google Drive, Box, Icedrive, OneDrive, Proton Drive, pCloud, Dropbox and Internxt.
Object storage has small free allowances too: 10 GB on Backblaze B2, 10 GB-month on Cloudflare R2 and 5 GB-months on Google Cloud Storage in three US regions. That fits configuration backups or a password vault export. None of the free consumer plans offers S3-style object lock, so keep the main offsite copy on paid storage.
S3 compatibility and which backup tools write to it
S3-compatible means the service speaks Amazon's S3 API, so any S3 tool can use it with a new endpoint and keys, and you can change provider without changing backup software. The S3-compatible storage guide explains the API and its gaps.
For Proxmox users, the cheapest working combinations are covered in cheapest S3-compatible storage for Proxmox backup, and the local side in the Proxmox Backup Server guide. Veeam users: see why Veeam S3 tiering jobs fail.
Immutability and object lock against ransomware
Ransomware attacks often target backups: if the backup server's keys can delete the bucket, so can the attacker who steals them. Object lock attaches a retention date to each object version. In governance mode, specially permitted users can still remove it. In compliance mode, nobody can shorten or remove it until the date passes; Wasabi says this includes Wasabi itself.
Backblaze documents object lock through both its S3-compatible API and its native API, in governance or compliance mode; in compliance mode no user can remove retention settings, only extend them.
Wasabi enables object lock only at bucket creation, and it cannot be turned off. Storj offers governance, compliance and legal hold. Hetzner lists object locking as a feature. Azure calls it immutable storage, on every access tier at no extra capacity charge. Cloudflare R2 has bucket locks set through Cloudflare's own API, so check your backup tool supports them.
Set the lock at least as long as an attack might go unnoticed, and remember locked data is billed until the lock expires. Our look at Veeam immutable backups covers the remaining gaps, and the 3-2-1-1-0 rule adds the immutable copy as a formal requirement.
The 3-2-1 rule and the offsite copy
The 3-2-1 backup rule asks for three copies on two kinds of storage, one offsite. Without a second building, a cloud bucket is the easiest offsite copy: no tapes to rotate, and it survives fire, flood and theft at the main site.
A typical small setup: a local backup on a NAS or Proxmox Backup Server for quick restores, plus a nightly copy to a locked S3 bucket for losing the site. The offsite backup guide compares cloud with tape, cloud backup options covers managed services, and retention is in the backup retention policy guide.
What cloud storage is not
EU data residency options
Hetzner, a German company, runs Object Storage in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki. Backblaze B2 has an EU Central region in Amsterdam, chosen at account creation, so pick it first. Wasabi has endpoints in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan and London. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have EU regions, sometimes at higher prices: Google Cloud Standard in Warsaw is $0.023 per GiB against $0.02 in Iowa.
Residency and jurisdiction differ: Backblaze, Wasabi, Cloudflare, Storj, AWS, Microsoft and Google are US companies wherever the data sits. If that matters, encrypt before upload (restic and Kopia do by default) and keep the keys in Europe.
Running your own S3 target
Teams with a second site can run their own S3 target. The Object Storage Ledger scores 23 products from public records, including immutability on a 0 to 5 scale.
Source: Object Storage Ledger 2026. Scorecards: Ceph RGW, MinIO AIStor, NetApp StorageGRID, MinIO Community Edition. The Ledger marks MinIO Community Edition as wound down for the commercial line; see MinIO alternatives after maintenance mode and the object storage vendors overview.
Frequently asked questions
For most small businesses and homelabs, an S3-compatible object store with object lock and low egress fees, such as Backblaze B2, Wasabi or Hetzner. Archive tiers suit copies you rarely read.
On storage price, AWS Glacier Deep Archive and Azure Archive at $0.00099 per GB a month (about $1 per TB) as of October 2026. Both have 180-day minimums plus retrieval and egress fees, so for backups you restore from, Backblaze B2 or Hetzner usually cost less in total.
Only for a small encrypted copy of important files. Verified free plans in the Mr.PlanB tracker range from 1 GB at Internxt to 20 GB at MEGA, several can delete inactive free accounts after 12 months, and none offers S3-style object lock.
Egress is the fee for downloading your data. The one large download is the restore after a disaster: at AWS's $0.09 per GB, a 2 TB restore costs about $171 in transfer alone.
Not on its own. Sync copies deletions and encrypted ransomware files to the cloud within seconds. They can hold a backup if a tool such as restic or Kopia writes versioned, encrypted archives to them.
Any S3-compatible object store. The S3 datastore backend arrived in Proxmox Backup Server 4.0 and has been officially supported since 4.2 (April 2026). It needs a local cache disk.
You need some form of immutability. Object lock in compliance mode stops anyone, including an attacker with your admin keys, from deleting backups before the retention date. B2, Wasabi, Storj, Hetzner, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer a form of it.
No. The 3-2-1 rule asks for three copies on two kinds of media with one offsite. The cloud bucket is the offsite copy; keep a local copy for fast restores and test both.
Hetzner runs in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki. Backblaze B2 has an EU Central region in Amsterdam, chosen at account creation, and Wasabi, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud offer European regions.
A fee for deleting data early. Wasabi bills 90 days, Storj Standard 30, and archive tiers 90 to 365, so short retention there costs more than the price per TB suggests.
Choose by what a restore costs
Every provider here stores backups cheaply. The differences appear when you need the data back. For most readers that means a locked S3 bucket at a backup-focused provider, a local copy for speed, and an archive tier only for data kept for years. Prices change, so check the vendor pages before you sign up.