SimpleBackups features, grouped by job, with the plan each needs

SimpleBackups features and the plan that unlocks each

SimpleBackups features fall into five jobs: taking the backup, storing it, protecting it, knowing it worked, and sharing access. The table shows the lowest plan that includes each feature, from the vendor's pricing page and documentation as read on 3 October 2026. Monthly-billing prices are Basic $0, Lite $49, Plus $99 and Max $299.

Scheduling and retention features

Presets run at fixed UTC times: daily at 03:00, twice daily at 01:00 and 13:00, weekly on Saturday at 02:00, monthly on the 1st at 01:30. Custom cron expressions run in your team's timezone. The minimum gap between runs is daily on Basic, 12 hours on Lite, one hour on Plus and five minutes on Max. A backup that breaks the limit is locked and does not run, and the dashboard names the limit.

Retention is a number of copies per schedule. A daily schedule keeping 7 and a monthly schedule keeping 12 rotate independently. There is no button to delete one run. You lower the count or delete the file in your own bucket. How far back retention should reach helps pick the numbers.

Storage and encryption features

Every backup has a primary destination. That can be a connected provider (the docs list more than 30, including AWS S3, Azure Blob, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, SFTP and Dropbox), SimpleStorage, or the local disk of the server that made the backup. Local is not available for serverless backups and cannot be mirrored. SimpleStorage quotas are 1 GB, 50 GB, 200 GB and 1 TB by plan.

Encryption uses AES-256 through OpenSSL with an RSA public key you paste in. You keep the private key. The docs warn that once a backup has run you cannot add, change or remove its key, so decide before the first run. Lose the private key and the files cannot be decrypted.

Monitoring features: alerts and anomaly detection

New backups notify on failure only. Success alerts are opt-in per backup and channel. SSH and serverless runs are retried up to three times before the failure alert is sent.

Anomaly detection runs after each backup. It flags a file under 25% or over double the median of up to 50 recent runs, an empty file, a dump far smaller than the reported database size, a file missing from storage, and warning text inside a run that reported success. A weekly sweep confirms stored backups are still present. This catches silent failures. It is not a restore test.

Team and compliance features

From Plus, a team has four roles: Owner, Administrator, Member and Viewer. Projects limit which backups a member can see. The Backup Recovery and Compliance Board logs restore actions and setting changes. Audit exports sit on Max. The homepage states ISO 27001 certification and GDPR compliance. SSO, SLAs and a HIPAA business associate agreement are Enterprise items.

What is missing from the SimpleBackups feature list

• Automated database restore. The docs class database and file restores as manual. Automatic restores apply to SaaS apps and volume snapshots.
• Scheduled restore testing. No feature restores a dump into a scratch database and reports back. You run that drill yourself with the acceptance checks.
• PostgreSQL point-in-time recovery. PostgreSQL backups are pg_dump files. Binary log support is documented for MySQL and MariaDB only.
• Large databases on low plans. Lite stops at 5 GB per database unless you add $25 per month for 250 GB more.

If the first three matter, compare pgBackRest for PostgreSQL or another service. Plan costs are in SimpleBackups pricing.