3 Hidden Costs to Look Out for When Buying a Backup Solution

It can be hard to pick the best backup solution. Vendors list a lot of features, complicated licensing structures, and different hardware requirements, which can make it hard to see the true long-term cost. At Epis Technology, we often help businesses deal with these problems and choose backup solutions that are affordable, flexible, and dependable. If you’re looking at VMware backup tools, thinking about cloud storage, or comparing integrated appliances, you need to know about the hidden costs before you choose a platform.

Below, we list three hidden costs that businesses often forget about and explain how Epis Technology can help get rid of them with Synology-powered architectures and smart planning.

Backup Models: The Start of Costs

Most backup solutions fit into one of two categories:

• Hardware and software for backups are sold separately.
• Backup devices that do everything in one box

Many businesses choose standalone software because they can use their current hardware again. But they often don’t realize how much the costs of running and licensing add up over time, especially in virtualized environments like VMware.

1. Costs of Licensing and Maintenance

Most backup companies charge by the host or by the CPU socket. A per-host license may be cheaper, but not always, depending on your infrastructure.

For instance, if you have a VMware server with two sockets and pay $500 for each socket, you’ll spend $1,000. But a per-host license for $800 would be cheaper. But this is just the first fee.

Costs of Hidden Licensing Include:

• Renewals of annual support (22%–27% of the original license fee)
• Fees to upgrade for big feature releases
• More licenses for advanced workloads, like Microsoft 365, NAS devices, and cloud workloads
• Add-ons for checking backups, deduplication, or replication

When you include renewals, perpetual and subscription licenses often cost almost the same after three years.

How Epis Technology Can Help

Epis Technology looks at your infrastructure, growth plans, and software needs to find the licensing model that will save you the most money. We help businesses save more than 50% on backup software costs in the first year alone by using Synology Active Backup, which has enterprise-level backup features and no per-device or per-socket licensing.

2. Cost of Management

When backup hardware and software come from different companies, fixing problems takes a lot of time and money. IT teams need to figure out if the problem has to do with:

• The hardware for storage
• The software for backups
• The layer of virtualization
• The network’s structure

Companies that don’t have their own IT staff often switch vendors, which wastes time, lowers productivity, and in some cases, even puts data at risk.

How Epis Technology is Useful

Epis Technology offers a complete backup architecture, which means:

• We set up, run, and improve both hardware (Synology NAS) and software (Active Backup)
• We offer consolidated support, so you don’t have to talk to a lot of different vendors
• We keep an eye on deployments ahead of time to stop problems before they get worse

This unified approach cuts down on the time it takes to fix problems by a lot and makes sure that the system works the same way every time.

3. Cost of storage

The most expensive limitation of free backup software is that it can’t do incremental backups. This makes the system do full backups every time, which takes up a lot of space.

A Sample Situation

• 7 days of backup retention
• 1 TB of source data
• Daily data change rate: 5%

Incremental backups save about 80% of storage space.
Freemium full backups: ~6× more storage consumed

More demand for storage means:

• More hard drives
• Additional expansion chassis
• Larger power and cooling requirements

How Epis Technology Helps

Using Synology NAS with global deduplication, Epis Technology designs backup architectures that minimize hardware consumption. In real-world deployments, such as SHISEIDO Taiwan, deduplication reduced storage usage by 54% (28 TB saved) — equivalent to roughly $1,500 in hardware cost reductions.

It All Adds Up Unless You Choose the Right Solution

When comparing enterprise backup software to Synology Active Backup, the savings are substantial:

⭐ More than 50% savings in year one alone
⭐ No per-device, per-socket, or per-user licensing
⭐ Unlimited Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backups
⭐ Integrated VMware, Hyper-V, physical server, and NAS protection
⭐ Advanced deduplication and efficient retention policies

For the same price many businesses pay for a single year of software licensing, Epis Technology can deploy:

• A full Synology NAS backup infrastructure
• Active Backup (with zero recurring license costs)
• Centralized monitoring
• Disaster recovery planning

This means you gain both enterprise-grade software and high-performance hardware  at a fraction of traditional backup costs.

About Epis Technology

Epis Technology specializes in enterprise backup architecture, Synology deployment, hybrid cloud protection, and disaster recovery planning. We help organizations replace complex, expensive backup ecosystems with cost-efficient, scalable, and license-free Synology solutions. From initial design to implementation and long-term support, our goal is to ensure your backups are reliable, efficient, and future-proof.