Microsoft 365 Backup Pricing: Per User or Per Gigabyte

There are two ways to pay for Microsoft 365 backup. Microsoft's own service charges for the amount of data protected. Almost everyone else charges a flat fee per user and, in most cases, does not count the gigabytes.

That makes the choice an arithmetic question before it is a product question. This page gives the arithmetic, then each published price with the date it was read.

Why back up a cloud service at all

Microsoft's Services Agreement answers this in its own words: "We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services". The same clause says Microsoft "is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer".

The recovery windows built into the service are short.

The mail figures come from Microsoft's pages on the Recoverable Items folder and deleted mailboxes. The OneDrive figures come from its retention and deletion page. A file deleted by a departing employee, or encrypted by ransomware and not noticed for four months, is outside every one of these.

How Microsoft 365 backup pricing works at Microsoft

The pricing page states the rate in one line: "The list price is $0.15/GiB/month of protected content." The page does not name the currency. Billing runs through an Azure subscription, and the overview adds that restores are free.

"Protected content" is wider than it sounds. It includes:

• the live size of each protected OneDrive, SharePoint site and mailbox
• online archive mailboxes
• first-stage and second-stage recycle bins
• deleted and versioned items in protected mailboxes

Microsoft's own example: a 1 GiB site with 0.5 GiB in its second-stage recycle bin, plus a 1 GiB mailbox with a 1 GiB archive, is billed as 3.5 GiB.

The break-even point

Divide any per-user monthly price by 0.15. The result is the amount of data per user at which Microsoft's service costs the same.

Below the break-even figure, Microsoft's service is cheaper. Above it, the flat fee wins. Remember that the GiB count is Microsoft's billable figure, so archives and recycle bins push it up.

A 25-user company, three ways

For comparison, 25 users on Veeam Data Cloud Foundation come to $87.50 a month at the published rate, whatever the data size. At 20 GiB each the two are close. At 100 GiB each, Microsoft's service costs more than four times as much.

Shared mailboxes and SharePoint sites add to Microsoft's GiB total without adding users. Per-user vendors count them in different ways, so ask how before comparing quotes.

What each product costs

Every figure below was read from the vendor's own page on 13 Nov 2026. No product was installed; the method box at the top of this page says what was and was not checked.

Microsoft 365 Backup

The only option billed by data size, and the only one that keeps the copy inside Microsoft 365. Retention is 3 months, 6 months or 1 to 10 years for OneDrive and SharePoint, and up to 2 years for Exchange. Restoring single files or folders is limited to the most recent 14 days.

• Best for: small data footprints, and teams that want nothing new to install.
• Limits: no Teams in the listed coverage, and no copy outside Microsoft.

Veeam Data Cloud

Veeam's purchasing page prices the Foundation tier at $3.50 per user per month for 10 to 50 users, $3.15 for 51 to 250 and $2.63 for 251 or more, "billed annually", with unlimited storage. Premium is $7.00 and adds faster recovery. The page shows USD.

• Best for: data-heavy teams of 10 or more who want a fixed, predictable bill.
• Limits: the page does not itemise covered services or state retention.

Syncro

Syncro's pricing page lists Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup as a $1.90 per user add-on with unlimited storage. Syncro is a platform for IT providers; its own plans start at $129 per technician per month on annual billing, so the add-on price is not the whole cost.

• Best for: IT providers already running Syncro.
• Limits: retention and minimums are not stated for the add-on.

NAKIVO

NAKIVO's product page says "Starting at $0.95 per user/month" and notes that "a minimum of 10 user licenses is required per order". It is software you run yourself, and you provide the storage. The page does not say which subscription term the starting price applies to.

• Best for: teams with their own storage and someone to run the software.
• Limits: storage, hosting and upkeep are extra and yours.

SpinBackup

Spin.AI's pricing page shows $3 per user per month with 30 GB per licence, and a "Minimum Subscription $5,000/year". For 25 users the rate works out at $75 a month, but the minimum is about $417 a month.

• Best for: larger organisations backing up several cloud services together.
• Limits: the minimum spend rules it out for most small teams.

The two free routes

Veeam's Community Edition is "limited to 10 users, 10 teams and 1TB of SharePoint data", with best-effort support. Synology's Active Backup is described as "license-free" but needs a Synology NAS. In both cases the software is free and the hardware, power and attention are not.

Not included, and why

Eleven further vendors were checked and left out of the table, because a comparison of prices needs prices.

• No public price on the page: Keepit, Hornetsecurity 365 Total Backup, Druva, AvePoint Cloud Backup and Redstor.
• Price shown by a script that could not be read reliably: Afi and Acronis. Their figures are not quoted here, because a misread number is worse than none.
• Pricing page could not be opened: Backupify, Rubrik, CloudAlly and Barracuda. Dropsuite's pricing address returned a not-found error.

Absence from the table says nothing about the quality of these products.

Where should the backup copy live?

Price is not the only difference. Microsoft says of its own service that data "never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary". That is convenient, and it means an account takeover or a tenant-wide problem touches the original and the backup together. Weak sign-in rules make that takeover more likely; see the password rules NIST now prohibits.

The UK NCSC's guidance on backups describes the common rule as "at least 3 copies, on 2 devices, and 1 offsite", and says it is "vital to keep multiple backups and to logically separate them". A third-party product, or a NAS in the office, gives that separation. Microsoft's service on its own does not.

Losing data can also start a legal clock. If personal data is lost or locked, the reporting windows in breach notification deadlines by jurisdiction apply whether or not a backup exists.

How to choose

1. Find your billable data size. Add mailbox sizes including archives to OneDrive and SharePoint usage, from the Microsoft 365 admin reports.
2. Divide by your user count and compare with the break-even table.
3. Decide whether you need a copy outside Microsoft. If yes, Microsoft's service alone does not meet that.
4. Check Teams. If chat history matters, confirm coverage on the vendor's current page.
5. Ask per-user vendors how shared mailboxes are counted and what the minimum order is.

This page compares published prices and terms only. How figures are read and dated is set out on the methodology page.