Storage Sizing Calculator
Estimate usable and raw storage needs for backups, logs, and general data retention.
This calculator gives a practical first-pass estimate for storage planning. It is useful for homelab services, log pipelines, backup targets, and hybrid cloud landing zones where you need to plan both usable capacity and raw capacity. It is my first tool and I am learning so its small by design. AI did help me build it and comment it out and create learning docs to take advantage of.
The model is intentionally simple so you can reason about it quickly:
- Daily data ingested
- Retention in days
- Replication factor for resilience
- Effective compression and dedup ratio
- Growth and buffer percentage
Results
Total usable data
0 TB
Before replication overhead
0 TB After replication and compression assumptionsTotal raw capacity
0 TB Includes growth and safety bufferSuggested purchased capacity
How to interpret this
Use this output as a planning baseline, then refine with workload specifics such as hot vs cold tiers, RAID or erasure coding overhead, and real measured compression ratios from your platform.
If this estimate is for production workloads, keep an additional operational buffer for snapshots, temporary spikes, and rebuild windows.