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Depending on the backup service you use, a Google Cloud backup bill can include snapshot or vault storage, management charges, retrieval fees for colder storage, and network/data-transfer charges when backup data moves between locations.
Most teams budget for the first one and get surprised by the other three. Here’s what each costs, and where the money actually goes on a real estate.
Editor’s note: Google Cloud US list prices as of August 2026
Persistent Disk snapshot pricing
Snapshots are incremental after the first one and compressed, so you’re billed on the actual snapshot size rather than the provisioned disk. A 500 GiB disk that’s 40% full and barely changes will cost far less than the disk itself.
| Snapshot type | Price | Minimum duration | Retrieval fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard, regional | $0.05 / GiB / month | None | None |
| Standard, multi-regional | $0.083 / GiB / month | None | None |
| Archive, regional | $0.019 / GiB / month | 90 days | $0.019 / GiB |
| Archive, multi-regional | $0.031 / GiB / month | 90 days | $0.031 / GiB |
Two things bite here.
Multi-regional standard snapshot storage is about 66% more expensive than regional storage. And, unless you change your project’s snapshot settings, Google’s predefined policy stores snapshots in the nearest multi-region by default. For a us-central1 disk, that’s the us multi-region.
Archive snapshots carry a 90-day minimum. Delete one after 3 weeks and you’re still billed for the remaining 69 days. Archive is for data you’re confident you’re keeping.
⚠️ One important limitation: archive snapshots aren’t a lifecycle tier that standard snapshots automatically transition into. Standard and archive snapshots use separate incremental chains, and Compute Engine snapshot schedules create standard snapshots. Archive snapshots therefore need to be designed as a separate retention workflow.
Backup and DR Service pricing
Backup and DR uses Google-managed, isolated backup-vault storage. The vault itself is created in a Google Cloud project, while Google manages the underlying backup storage. Two components:
Vault storage, charged per GiB per month for everything held in the vault, for the full enforced retention period. For data held in the vault in us-central1, the price is approximately $0.045/GiB-month.
A management fee, measured by protected capacity. For a Compute Engine VM protected to a backup vault, Google currently charges approximately $0.02/GiB-month of attached source capacity; independently protected disks are approximately $0.01/GiB-month.
The part that catches people: deleting or stopping protection of the source workload doesn’t necessarily end the backup bill. Vault storage continues to be charged until retained backups expire, and Google also applies a long-term-retention management charge to backup data belonging to resources that are no longer under active protection.
Vault retention is enforced from a minimum set at vault creation, between 1 day and 99 years, so a vault configured with a long minimum commits you to that storage cost whether or not you still want the data.
Cloud Storage class pricing for long-term retention
Cloud Storage pricing applies only when your backup architecture explicitly writes backup data into a Cloud Storage bucket. It does not apply to standard or archive Persistent Disk snapshots, or to backups held in a Backup and DR backup vault.
If you’re archiving backups to Cloud Storage rather than holding snapshots, the class you pick moves the bill by more than an order of magnitude.
| Class | Storage / GiB / month | Minimum duration | Retrieval fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $0.020 | None | None |
| Nearline | $0.010 | 30 days | $0.01 / GiB |
| Coldline | $0.004 | 90 days | $0.02 / GiB |
| Archive | $0.0012 | 365 days | $0.05 / GiB |
Archive storage is roughly 6% the price of Standard. The catch is the retrieval fee, which is 2.5x Standard’s storage price per GiB, and the 365-day minimum.
Rule of thumb: Don’t choose Archive on storage price alone. Google positions Coldline for data accessed at most quarterly and Archive for data accessed less than once a year; minimum-duration and retrieval charges can change which class is cheaper for your actual retention pattern.
What this looks like on a real estate
Take 40 Compute Engine VMs holding 20 TiB of provisioned disk. Snapshots compress and dedupe down to roughly 14 TiB of stored snapshot data on a 30-day retention. All figures monthly, regional.
Option A, standard snapshots only:
14,336 GiB Ă— $0.05 = $716.80 / month
Option B, Backup and DR vault:
14,336 GiB vault storage Ă— $0.045 = $645.12
20,480 GiB protected VM capacity Ă— $0.02 = $409.60
Approximate total: $1,054.72/month, excluding applicable data-transfer charges.
Note the management fee is measured on attached source capacity, not backup size, so it doesn’t shrink when your snapshots compress well.
The charges people forget
Orphaned snapshots. Deleting a VM doesn’t delete its snapshots. On an estate with any churn, these accumulate quietly for years. Worth an audit before you do anything else.
Additional snapshot locations. Standard snapshots are already stored redundantly, and globally scoped snapshots can generally restore into another region. If you deliberately maintain separate snapshot chains in multiple storage locations, you’ll pay for the additional stored data and may incur network charges. A new snapshot chain in a different location begins with a full snapshot.
Retrieval during a DR test. Archive snapshots carry a $0.019/GiB retrieval fee. On the 11 TiB archived in this example, the archive retrieval charge alone is about $214 per full restore, before destination disk and any applicable network charges. Four full retrievals a year would therefore add about $856 in archive retrieval fees alone.
Vault data after workload deletion. Covered above, but it’s the one that shows up on a bill nobody can explain.
Paying twice for the same disk. If you attach a third-party backup tool to resources that still have a native GCP snapshot schedule running, you’re storing and paying for two sets of backups. It’s an easy state to end up in during a migration, and neither system will stop you. Audit for native schedules before you point anything else at the same resources.
How third-party pricing compares
Third-party backup tools charge on a different unit, which makes the comparison less obvious than it looks.
N2W (formerly N2WS) prices per protected instance in bands (20, 50, 200, 1000+ instances), and the data attached to those instances doesn’t change the price. Standard is $249/month for up to 20 instances. Terms are month-to-month with no contract and a 30-day trial.
The important caveat: that license price doesn’t include storage. N2W runs inside the customer’s own cloud account and the backups sit in the customer’s own storage, on their own Google Cloud bill. So a fair comparison is license + your storage cost against Google’s vault price, which already includes storage.
The structural difference is what matters for a forecast. The pricing models respond to different variables. Backup and DR combines stored backup volume with protected source capacity. N2W’s published license model is based on instance/VM bands, while the customer’s underlying cloud-storage costs still vary with the amount of backup data stored.
One caveat specific to GCP, and it cuts against the banded model: N2W’s GCP support in version 5.0 has no archiving to cheaper storage tiers. Backup data stays on standard snapshot storage at $0.05/GiB. On AWS and Azure, tiering to cheap storage is where most of the cost advantage comes from, and that lever isn’t there on GCP yet. Price the storage line at the standard rate when you model it.
Four ways to cut the bill
- Audit orphaned snapshots first. Costs nothing, and on a mature estate it’s usually the biggest single number.
- Set the right snapshot storage location. Google’s predefined policy uses the nearest multi-region; switching appropriate workloads to regional snapshot storage can materially reduce the storage rate.
- Review retention and delete snapshots you no longer need.
- Match storage class to realistic restore frequency, not to the cheapest row. Coldline usually beats Archive once retrieval is priced in.
Related content: Read our guide to AWS backup pricing
FAQ
For Persistent Disk snapshots, about $51/TiB/month at the standard regional rate ($0.05/GiB) and about $19/TiB/month archived. Backup and DR Service charges vault storage plus a per-resource management fee, both of which need checking on Google’s current pricing page.
No. Snapshots are billed per GiB of stored snapshot data per month. They’re incremental and compressed, so the cost is usually well below the provisioned disk size, but there’s no free allowance.
Common causes include snapshots retained after their source VM is gone, use of Google’s default multi-regional storage policy instead of lower-cost regional storage, and early-deletion charges on archive snapshots that haven’t reached their 90-day minimum.
Not for snapshots, and not for Backup and DR vault contents. Vault backups can’t be deleted before the enforced retention expires, which means they keep billing after the workload is gone.
Not necessarily. Standard snapshots charge primarily for stored snapshot data, while Backup and DR combine vault storage with a management charge based on the protected workload. Which is cheaper depends on source capacity, stored backup size, retention and location. Backup and DR also provides enforced retention and isolation that standard snapshots don’t, so the two aren’t purely price-equivalent services.