Estimate your daily cost

To estimate your daily cost for CITES Backups:

• First, look over the CITES Enterprise Backup service levels and decide on what level of service you expect to use.
• Estimate how many gigabytes of data your machine will be storing each day. For example, if your machine will back up 10GB of data, and you choose a service level that includes 3 copies of your data, your daily total could equal up to 30GB.
• Enter your estimated number of gigabytes stored on a typical day in the box below and click Calculate.

Enter your estimated number of gigabytes stored on a typical day and click Calculate.

How your charges are calculated

The CITES backup server performs a daily audit that calculates the total amount of data that your client is storing on the system, and that amount is then run through a charge program to create a daily charge.  At the end of the billing cycle, the billing system adds all your daily charges together to establish your monthly CITES Backups charge. Your monthly backup charge will show up on your University Telephone bill, with a label that identifies the client.

CITES does not average your monthly charges, and the length of the billing cycle can change the amount of your monthly bill.

Our billing formula

The amount charged is $0.55 per GB per year. There is also a small minimum charge of $0.01 per day that we use for accounting and tracking purposes.

Feel free to use the calculator above for quick calculations!

How to save money

Since we calculate backup costs based on the amount of data you store on a daily basis, you can reduce your cost by being conservative in what you send to us. You can use both Exclude lists and Domains settings to limit the filesystems and types of files that get backed up.

To save money on backups:

• Do not back up file systems that contain temporary files. Use exclude lists to prevent such files or directories from being backed up. Exclude all cache files for your web browser, all temporary editor files, mailtmp directories and files, core files (in UNIX systems), and page files (in Windows systems). In UNIX systems, also exclude /tmp, /Scratch, and /usr/tmp (or /var/tmp).
• Do not back up domains such as network drives that may be saved elsewhere or that can be created easily from CDROM or diskette. Prevent network drives from being backed up by modifying your settings for excluded domains.

For more information on setting up domain lists and on including or excluding files, see Configuring your TSM client.

Last modified on Dec 5, 2005