Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery review
A focused AWS service for orchestrating server recovery with continuous replication.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Sep 2026
Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates supported physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure to AWS. It is designed for organizations recovering applications and databases from on-premises environments, other clouds, or AWS infrastructure into AWS. The service focuses on server recovery rather than a broad backup catalog, combining replication with recovery launches, drills, point-in-time recovery, and coordinated recovery plans.
The published pricing model is usage-based at $0.028 per actively replicating source server per hour, billed monthly. Its Usage-based pricing plan includes continuous data replication, test launches, recovery launches, and point-in-time recovery. The service has no free plan. The DRS rate covers the service itself; AWS EBS, EC2, and other resource charges are additional, so the total recovery environment cost depends on the AWS resources used for storage and compute.
Its strongest capability is recovery orchestration. Recovery plans can coordinate server recovery in order, while automated network replication and recovery, server conversion for AWS recovery, failback to original source infrastructure, and post-launch actions support a structured recovery process. Recovery instance launches and drills provide a way to exercise plans before an incident. Organizations already standardizing on AWS should consider it when they need continuous server replication and coordinated recovery into that cloud. It is a less natural fit for teams seeking a cloud-neutral recovery destination or native immutable backups, because recovery is centered on AWS and EBS point-in-time snapshots can be deleted unless additional protective measures are applied.
Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Continuous block-level replication with point-in-time recovery
- Ordered recovery plans, drills, failback, and post-launch validation
- Supports physical, virtual, and cloud source servers
- Where it doesn't
- Recovery is centered on launching servers into AWS
- EBS, EC2, storage, and other AWS charges are additional
- Point-in-time snapshots are not natively immutable
Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery fact sheet, pricing and score →
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