Lightsail backup issue - cost

Hello,

Thank you for using Amazon Lightsail. You may already be aware of this, but referring to the Amazon Lightsail FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/), under the question "Q: What do Lightsail snapshots cost?", the following is explained:

"Lightsail snapshots cost $0.05 USD/GB-month for both instance snapshots and for disk snapshots. This means if you take a snapshot of your 30 GB SSD instance and keep it for a month, you pay $1.50 USD at the end of the month. When you take multiple successive snapshots of the same instance, Lightsail automatically cost-optimizes your snapshots. For each new snapshot you take, you're changed only for the part of the instance that changed. In the example above, if your instance only changes by 2 GB, your second instance snapshot costs only $0.10 USD per month."

So, only your first snapshot would increase in cost (vs a smaller instance size). Any subsequent snapshots of the instance will be cost-optimized and you would only be charged for the difference between snapshots. If you have multiple snapshots, you would not pay $8/mo for every snapshot ($0.05 USD/GB-month X 160 GB), unless you make 160GB of changes between snapshots.

The way to reduce backup cost would be to simply store less data on your instance. A few ways you can accomplish this are by offloading static files to Lightsail buckets, or by using a Lightsail Database instead of an on-instance database.

I hope this helps!

-Max

I know that. issue is i do not need 160gb disk space in 8GB ram instance. If i do snapshot on it i pay more. And i am using 10% of diskspace.

Database backup i just have to do cron job to export sql every day to google drive.