FluentPro Backup offers subscription plans based on the amount of storage space required. If you're unsure how much storage you need or want to estimate your data size, follow this guide to choose the right plan.
When you sign up for FluentPro Backup for the first time and add an environment for data backup, you automatically receive a free trial subscription.
The trial lasts 14 days and includes:
- 250GB of storage for most environments.
- 100GB of storage for Dataverse environments.
During the trial, you can create backups of the data you want to protect, check how much storage they currently use, and use the Storage Forecast to estimate how your storage usage may change over the next year.
Step 1: Back up your data
This trial allows you to estimate your storage needs without any commitment. For this, perform the following:
- Add the environment you want to back up (e.g., Project for the Web, Dataverse, or Planner).
- Select the data you plan to back up from the environment.
- Start the backup process.
These three steps are usually done once you sign up for FluentPro Backup using the onboarding wizard.
Once completed, FluentPro Backup will calculate and display the storage used.
You will find the storage used for your backup on the Home page of your FluentPro Backup account -> Stored Data -> Actual. This number shows how much storage your backup occupies.
This value provides a starting point for estimating your storage requirements.
For example, during the trial, if you back up your environment and see that ~10GB of storage was used, you will need a subscription plan offering at least 120GB (or more to accommodate future growth, as all further backup actions will multiply this number).
However, you should not base your subscription size on the first backup alone. As you create additional backups, the amount of stored data can change depending on your backup schedule, retention settings, and how often your source data changes.
Step 2: Estimate future storage usage
Use the Backup Usage Forecast -> View Forecast on the Home page to estimate how much storage your backups may require over the next year.
The forecast takes into account your existing backup data and configuration, including:
- Current backup data: the size and number of projects already included in your backups.
- Backup frequency: how often scheduled backups are created.
- Retention policy: how long backups are retained and when they are removed.
- Expected number of projects: you can adjust the number of projects to account for expected growth. Storage requirements for additional projects are estimated using averages based on your current projects.
The forecast chart combines your historical storage usage with the estimated storage usage for the next year. Because the calculation includes your retention policy, it also accounts for backups that are expected to be removed over time.
If your backup schedule is configured to back up only modified data, the accuracy of the forecast depends on the available backup history. The system uses previous backups to estimate how frequently projects change and how much data is typically added.
For a more representative estimate, allow approximately 3–5 scheduled backups to run under normal conditions before using the forecast for planning.
If you don't consider modification dates and include the same project data in each backup, you need less historical data because you can calculate storage usage more directly from backup size, backup frequency, and retention policy.
The chart helps you compare:
- Historical and forecast stored size: see how much storage your backups have used so far and how much they are estimated to require in the future.
- Historical and forecast item count: depending on the environment, this may represent projects, boards, or other backed-up items. This helps you understand how changes in the number of items may affect storage requirements.
- Storage growth over time: see how your stored data is expected to grow while your configured retention policy removes backups that no longer need to be retained.
You can change the Expected [item] count to predict planned growth and select Update to recalculate the forecast. For example, if you currently back up eight projects but expect to have more in the future, you can enter the expected number to see how this growth may affect your storage needs. For additional items, FluentPro Backup estimates their storage requirements based on your existing backup data.
Step 3: Choose your subscription
Use your Actual storage usage together with the Storage Forecast to determine which subscription capacity is appropriate for your environment.
When selecting a plan, consider not only how much storage your backups use today, but also the estimated storage usage shown for the coming year. If you expect to add more projects, include that growth in the forecast before evaluating the available subscription options.