Disaster Recovery (DR) is a crucial feature to ensure availability and data protection in modern information systems. A common DR approach requires the replication of services in a set of virtual machines running in the cloud as backups. This leads to considerable monetary costs and managing efforts to keep such cloud VMs. We present GINJA, a DR solution for transactional database management systems (DBMS) that uses only cloud storage services such as Amazon S3. GINJA works at file-system level to efficiently capture and replicate data updates to a remote cloud storage service, achieving three important goals: (1) reduces the costs for maintaining a cloud-based DR to less than one dollar per month for relevant databases’ sizes and workloads (up to 222× less than the traditional approach of having a DBMS replica in a cloud VM); (2) allows a precise control of the operational costs, durability and performance trade-offs; and (3) introduces a small performance overhead to the DBMS (e.g., less than 5% overhead for the TPC-C workload with ≈ 10 seconds of data loss in case of disasters).