What every vendor charges to move data out

Storage price alone does not predict a restore bill

Storage price alone can rank the wrong provider for backups. Internet egress may be billed per GB, included up to a fixed amount, linked to average storage, bundled with a base plan, or unmetered while retrieval and request charges remain. The comparison therefore keeps transfer, retrieval, requests, capacity minimums, duration minimums, and policy constraints separate.

A price that is not published is never treated as zero. When an official page did not publish a class-specific allowance, overage rate, or restore rate, the table shows not published instead of treating the missing price as free.

None at present.

Every provider uses one of several incompatible egress shapes

All eighteen vendors are listed, including the hard cases, because dropping them would make the comparison look cleaner and less useful. Each claim cell cites the vendor's own page, with the date we retrieved it listed below.

Class-specific exceptions are listed separately. Google Rapid, DigitalOcean Cold, Scaleway Glacier, and OVHcloud archive classes cannot safely inherit every rule from the vendor's standard or hot class.

A common transfer volume produces different line items

For a nominal 2,000-unit public-internet download with 5,000 units stored, the transfer-only arithmetic below uses each vendor's published GB or GiB unit. It assumes the named allowance is unused, the listed region and destination are eligible, and every byte stays in the first paid band. Storage, requests, retrieval, fixed fees, taxes, credits, and negotiated terms are excluded.

The zero-dollar rows are not equivalent promises. Backblaze's result depends on average storage, Wasabi's result is within a usage-policy limit, and R2's result removes the egress charge while leaving operations and class-specific retrieval intact. [6] [8] [5]

Restoring backup data is a read operation, not a deletion

Restoring backup data can trigger request, retrieval, egress, and temporary-copy storage charges. It does not trigger an early-deletion charge by itself. Minimum-duration charges apply only when the scenario also deletes, overwrites, moves, or transitions an object before the applicable duration. [1] [3] [4] [5]

Free internet egress therefore cannot be read as a free restore. R2 Infrequent Access, Tigris Infrequent Access and Archive Instant Retrieval, OVHcloud Infrequent Access and Active Archive, and Scaleway Glacier all pair free or included internet transfer with a separate retrieval or restore charge. [5] [23] [12] [11]

Compare the bill, not the marketing label

Before choosing a backup target, model a normal month and a recovery month. Use the provider's unit system, region, destination, average or active storage definition, included plan quota, object count, storage class, and restored-copy duration. Then mark unpublished rates as not published.

A valid comparison can decline to name a winner. Regional eligibility, currency, policy enforcement, fixed subscriptions, and unpublished cold-tier rates can make two rows not comparable even when their storage prices appear close.