Estimate how much disk and cloud space your backup schedule needs before you buy storage or pick a plan. Change any value and the results update instantly.
How the estimate works
A full backup is your data size multiplied by the compression setting. An incremental holds one day's changes. A differential holds everything changed since the last full, so it grows through the week. The calculator assumes changes are spread across the data, so repeated changes to the same records make real differentials smaller than this estimate.
For differential and incremental schedules, one extra full backup is counted, because the oldest daily backups you keep still need the full backup they were based on.
The 12-month figure applies your growth rate to the combined local and off-site total. Add headroom of 20 to 30% on top, because disks that are nearly full cause backup failures.
Reading the result
- Local storage should sit on a different disk from the data itself.
- Off-site storage is what you need in Google Drive, on an FTP server or at a second site. Free Google accounts include 15 GB shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos.
- If the numbers are too big, switch daily fulls to weekly full plus differentials, enable compression if your SQL Server edition supports it, or keep fewer off-site days and add weekly and monthly copies instead. The retention guide shows a balanced schedule.
Put the plan into practice
Velocity runs full, differential or incremental backups on a schedule and sends each one to a local folder, Google Drive or FTP/FTPS, so the plan you sized here runs by itself.