Backup £/TB Tracker 2026: The Storage-Crisis Knock-On

Why the storage crisis is turning up in backup £/TB, not headline drive prices

Backup admins are used to the £/TB line falling every year as nearline HDD and archive media got denser and cheaper. In 2026, that assumption is under pressure: nearline HDD and enterprise SSD supply is increasingly competing with AI and HPC demand for the same manufacturing capacity, tightening availability for the exact drive classes that underpin on-premise backup repositories and cold-tier cloud infrastructure.

The knock-on effect is subtle rather than dramatic. Cloud backup and object-storage list pricing has stayed comparatively stable through this period, but the gaps between hot, cool, cold and archive tiers — and between locked-in procurement rates and open-market pricing — have become the place where the underlying scarcity actually surfaces. For a UK buyer, the practical question is no longer 'what does a TB cost?' but 'which tier, which contract length, and whose retrieval terms?'

The anatomy of a backup repository cost per TB

A defensible £/TB figure for backup has to account for more than the storage-class sticker price. The components that actually determine delivered cost are: the storage class chosen (hot, cool, nearline, cold, or archive); the contract term and commitment level; retrieval and restore fees; egress; API call charges; minimum storage duration and early-deletion penalties; VAT; immutability or object-lock overhead; and the backup software licence sitting on top of the raw capacity.

That last point matters more than it looks. The UK G-Cloud 14 framework, for example, lists Backup as a Service at £550 per 100TB of source data — a bundled figure covering software and service delivery, not a storage-only rate. Compare that directly against a pure storage tariff and you will draw the wrong conclusion about what's driving cost.

Cloud tiers compared: hyperscalers vs specialist providers in 2026

Lined up on a per-TB-month basis, the three major hyperscalers show a consistent shape: a premium hot tier, a mid-priced cool/nearline tier, and an archive tier priced close to zero before retrieval fees. Google Cloud runs Nearline at $10.24, Coldline at $4.10 and Archive at $1.02 per TB-month. AWS runs S3 Standard (first 50TB) at $23.55, Standard-IA at $12.80, Glacier Instant Retrieval at $4.10 and Glacier Deep Archive at roughly $1.01. Azure Blob sits at $18.43 for Hot, $10.24 for Cool and roughly $1.01 for Archive.

Specialist providers price differently: Backblaze B2 is a flat $6.95 per TB-month and Wasabi is $7.99 per TB-month, both advertised with no egress fees for most use cases. That flat, no-egress model removes one of the biggest variables in true backup TCO — restore and egress charges — even where the headline rate sits above a hyperscaler's cheapest archive tier. Readers weighing this against on-premise media economics can compare SSD vs HDD cost per TB for the underlying device-level context.

The UK benchmark: G-Cloud 14 rates vs open-market bands

The strongest UK-specific data point available is the G-Cloud 14 pricing document: cold/archive Storage as a Service at £7.00 per TB per month and hot Storage as a Service at £20.00 per TB per month, both under a 36-month contract. These are procurement benchmarks, not proof of broader market pricing — public-sector framework rates are typically negotiated well below general commercial terms.

Set against that, a 2026 UK market guide puts cloud backup storage bands at roughly 1p per GB per month for cold/archive tiers, 4p-7p per GB per month for standard business backup with reasonable restore speeds, and 12p-15p per GB per month for hot storage with instant access and unlimited restores — translating to roughly £10 to £154 per TB per month across the range. The gap between the G-Cloud hot rate (£20) and the top of the open-market hot band (£154) illustrates why a single 'UK backup price' figure is meaningless without specifying contract type. Buyers negotiating multi-year commitments to lock in framework-style rates may want to learn about storage financing options before signing.

Hidden costs and licensing models that distort the headline £/TB

Archive tiers look dramatically cheap on paper — sub-$1.50 per TB-month across all three hyperscalers — but that price rarely reflects the full retrieval and compliance picture. Slower restore times, retrieval fees, and minimum storage durations with early-deletion penalties are usually priced separately from the storage tier itself, and they can dominate total cost for any repository that gets tested or restored regularly rather than left untouched.

Backup software licensing adds another layer entirely. Per-TB, per-VM and per-socket models (the structure familiar to Veeam customers, among others) sit on top of whatever storage tariff is chosen, which is exactly why the G-Cloud bundled service price (£550 per 100TB) sits well above what a storage-only tariff of £7-£20 per TB per month would suggest in isolation. For repositories that need tamper-proof retention rather than just cheap capacity, it's worth reading how object-lock and WORM-style controls change the cost equation — see our guide to understand immutable backup architectures.

• •Separate the storage-class rate from retrieval, egress and API charges before comparing quotes
• •Treat 'backup as a service' bundle pricing (like G-Cloud's £550/100TB) as software + storage + support combined, not storage alone
• •Check minimum storage duration and early-deletion penalties before moving short-lived backup sets to archive tiers
• •Flat, no-egress specialist pricing (Backblaze B2, Wasabi) can reduce restore-cost unpredictability even where the base rate is higher than a hyperscaler archive tier

Worked examples: scaling storage-only rates across SMB, mid-market and enterprise volumes

Applying the stated unit rates directly to common repository sizes gives a useful storage-only baseline — before software licensing, egress, retrieval or operational overhead are added. Using the G-Cloud 14 cold archive rate of £7.00 per TB per month: a 10TB SMB repository costs £70/month, a 100TB mid-market repository costs £700/month, and a 1PB (1,000TB) enterprise repository costs £7,000/month in storage alone. At the hot-tier G-Cloud rate of £20.00 per TB per month, the same volumes scale to £200/month, £2,000/month and £20,000/month respectively.

The point of this exercise isn't to produce a finished TCO figure — it's to show how much of the eventual bill is determined purely by tier choice, before a single retrieval fee or software licence is added. An enterprise buyer choosing hot over cold archive at 1PB is looking at a £13,000/month storage-only gap on these rates alone, which is exactly the kind of decision that should be stress-tested against actual restore frequency using a downtime cost calculator before committing to a tier.

How unpredictable data growth changes TCO across pricing models

The worked examples above assume a fixed volume, but few real repositories stay static — and how a repository's total cost of ownership responds to growth depends heavily on which pricing model it sits on, especially once a multi-year contract is involved.

Tiered hyperscaler pricing carries a threshold effect that flat pricing doesn't: AWS S3 Standard, for instance, is priced at $23.55 per TB-month specifically for the first 50TB, which means unplanned growth past that point can shift a repository into a different pricing band rather than simply multiplying the same rate. Buyers scaling quickly need to model where their volume sits relative to these thresholds, not just apply today's per-TB rate to tomorrow's forecast.

Flat-rate specialists remove that variable. Backblaze B2 ($6.95 per TB-month) and Wasabi ($7.99 per TB-month) both charge the same rate regardless of volume and advertise no egress fees for most use cases, so cost scales linearly as data grows — there's no tier boundary to cross and no restore-cost spike to plan around, which makes long-term budgeting considerably more predictable for repositories with uncertain growth curves.

UK framework contracts sit at the opposite end of the predictability spectrum in a different way: the G-Cloud 14 rates of £7.00 per TB per month (cold/archive) and £20.00 per TB per month (hot) are fixed for the full 36-month term. Growth within that contract simply multiplies a locked-in unit rate — helpful if open-market prices rise, but it also means a buyer can't renegotiate downward if commercial rates fall, and is committed to the same tier structure for three years regardless of how access patterns evolve. For buyers who can't forecast growth confidently, that trade-off between tiered thresholds, flat linear scaling, and multi-year rate locks is arguably a bigger TCO lever than the headline £/TB figure itself.

A decision framework for choosing backup storage in 2026

With tier, contract length and retrieval terms all pulling the £/TB figure in different directions, the right choice depends on matching storage class to actual access patterns rather than the lowest sticker price. A few checks help narrow this down before signing anything.

Beyond 2026, expect the spread between hyperscaler tiers, UK framework rates and specialist flat-rate pricing to remain the dominant driver of backup repository cost, given that nearline HDD and NAND supply continues to compete with AI and HPC demand for the same manufacturing capacity. Tier discipline, not just provider choice, is likely to stay the main lever UK buyers have.

• •RTO/RPO requirements: fast restore needs point towards hot/nearline tiers or no-egress specialist storage, not deep archive
• •Compliance and data residency: check whether UK-hosted or G-Cloud-listed options are mandated before comparing global list prices
• •Contract length and budget: 36-month frameworks can undercut open-market bands materially, but reduce flexibility
• •Access frequency: archive tiers under $1.50/TB-month only stay cheap if retrieval stays rare
• •For deep, rarely-accessed compliance copies, it's worth weighing whether to investigate tape storage for backup as a lower-cost long-term alternative to cloud archive tiers

Methodology

This tracker compiles per-TB and per-GB storage pricing published in 2026 cloud-pricing comparisons, a UK 2026 backup pricing market guide, and a UK government G-Cloud 14 pricing document originally issued for a 36-month procurement framework. Figures were gathered between January and May 2026 and are presented with their original scope intact: cloud object-storage tier prices are kept separate from bundled backup-as-a-service prices, and UK public-sector framework rates are kept separate from general commercial market bands.

Per-GB-month figures were converted to per-TB-month only where the source gave a clear, unambiguous GB-month rate; no rates were averaged, extrapolated or blended across sources. Worked examples in this piece apply stated unit rates directly to illustrative volumes (10TB, 100TB, 1PB) to show storage-only scaling, and are explicitly flagged as excluding software licensing, egress, retrieval and operational overhead, which are covered qualitatively where the underlying data did not include specific figures.

Because G-Cloud rates reflect a negotiated public-sector framework and the UK market guide reflects directional estimates rather than an audited price list, neither should be read as a universal market price — both are presented as distinct, clearly-scoped benchmarks rather than merged into a single averaged figure.

Sources

Every figure in this article traces to the sources below.

• •Finout — 2026 cloud storage tier pricing comparison across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
• •UK Government Digital Marketplace — G-Cloud 14 backup and archive pricing document
• •Cloudswitched — 2026 UK cloud backup pricing guide and market bands
• •Tusk Backup — 2026 comparison of Backblaze B2 and Wasabi storage pricing