Difficult to read the title, right? Yes, a lot of prefixing to set the costs into some context, as we’re going to talk about Azure, sub – storage accounts, sub – files shares, sub – (snapshots) backups and, yet finally, the resulting costs. I’m looking back on a three-month service request with Azure now to just get answered what I’m actually paying for. Well, most of the Azure people didn’t even understand my question, so the request took these ages to be serviced… but that’s another topic and other “big” companies disappoint no differently.
So, what’s the problem? As you might know, there is plenty of cost factors related to storage accounts (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator). Storage, transactions, transfer, sync and so on. A certain cost factor is backup snapshot storage allocation, if you follow the recommended way of backing up your file shares (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/azure-file-share-backup-overview , https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-snapshots-files).
Since the overall monthly cost for the storage account went way beyond the expected numbers, I opened the portal to examine the latest monthly amounts for storage, transactions, transfer, sync… That’s easy for e.g. regular storage account allocation. I recommend consulting the included storage browser for an over view.
But, you guess it, there is no easy way to find out about the backup snapshot storage allocation. No info the the Snapshots View of the file share, neither in the Backup View. And, since the snapshots only save an incremental change difference of the actual file share content, there also is no straightforward rule to estimation.
So, maybe, the newly introduced Backup Center / Backup Reports may help, since this is all Azure standard backup architecture. Nope, they obviously have a datum for file share backup allocation in place but it always reads 0 😕
Ok, now, after the three months mentioned above, they directed me to the storage account Metrics view, metric: File Share Snapshot Size, to verify the invoiced allocation.
Given these numbers throwed to the Azure pricing calculator finally justifed the invoiced sum for the overall storage accounts cost. And btw, you’re not strained to rely on the pricing calculator all alone. Azure also offers an XLS based calculator (https://aka.ms/AzureBackupCostEstimates) with documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/azure-backup-pricing#estimate-costs-for-backing-up-azure-file-shares) that also allows for a perspectivce cost calculation in a variety of scenarios.
Closing up on this post, there is one advice: don’t try to understand what you might have downloaded as an XLS daily usage file along with cost and Invoices (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/understand/download-azure-daily-usage), if you don’t really need to. This is true undocumented science 🤣 For example, the daily backup snapshots of the file share in question were just marked as Hot LRS Data Stored, as any regular file share action. Well encrypted…
Have fun!
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