Bring your own storage: why it matters for backup
Restow writes encrypted, deduplicated backup chunks to storage you already control (local disk, S3-compatible object storage, NFS or SMB) instead of billing you for space in a storage service it operates itself. That's not a feature so much as an absence: there is no Restow cloud for your data to live in, by design.
Two separate bills become one you control
A vendor-hosted backup typically bundles two things into one price: the backup software, and the storage capacity it writes to. The second one is where a vendor's pricing power over your data actually lives, since it usually scales with how much you protect, not with anything you can negotiate directly. Bring your own storage separates the two: pick a cheap S3-compatible provider (Hetzner Object Storage, Garage, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, AWS S3, or others), reuse capacity you already operate, or keep everything on local disk with nothing metered per gigabyte at all. What it costs is what your storage choice actually costs: see the 5-year pricing math for what a per-GB meter compounds to over time as a contrast.
Two bills, or one you control
Where the capacity sits, and who sets its price.
It's also a trust boundary, not just a price one
Storage you control is storage a backup vendor can't unilaterally change the terms on later, can't lose in an outage that's also your only copy, and can't restrict your access to on export. See Your data is your data for the encryption side of this same boundary, and the storage feature page for exactly which targets Restow supports today, including running more than one target per organization as a primary-plus-copy pattern.
Frequently asked
What does "bring your own storage" mean for backup software?
It means the backup tool encrypts and writes your data to storage you already choose and pay for, such as local disk, S3-compatible object storage, NFS or SMB, instead of operating its own storage service and billing you through it. Restow does not operate a hosted storage service at all; there is nowhere for your data to end up except where you pointed it.
Isn't self-managed storage more work than a fully-hosted backup?
For the storage layer specifically, yes: you're responsible for that disk, bucket or share staying available and backed up in its own right, which is a real operational cost worth naming rather than glossing over (see "Your data is your data" for the honest version of this trade-off). What it buys back is a storage bill with no backup-vendor markup, and a hard boundary against your backup vendor also becoming your storage vendor with its own separate pricing power over your data.