Google G Suite (formerly known as “Google Apps”) contains a broad range of everyday business tools, allowing you to move most of your activities to the cloud. In this article, we are going to overview G Suite basic backup practices and answer the question “Do you ever need to make a backup of cloud-based data?”
G Suite Services
Google allows you to build a customizable workplace with easy collaboration and centralized data access management. Your cloud-based data is stored across many Google data centers, thus lowering the risk of disaster. G Suite also supports a versioning mechanism for file storage and has almost unlimited Gmail mailboxes.
This means that you can always roll back any changes made to a working document or archive, for a duration of 30 days. If we talk about email - you can simply save all emails, with no need to periodically clean the mailbox.
These features protect your data from most human errors, but they cannot protect from intentionally deleted data. Remember that the main restore mechanism is the “Trashcan” that is limited in days storing and could be flushed by a user with no way to get the data back (a user could simply think that this data is no longer needed). Files' versioning mechanism does also has a limited history.
Why Do You Need Google Account Backup
Backing up of cloud-based documents allows you to recover a file even if it was deleted from all places, including the Trashcan. You should also think about data archival requirements, those are typically implied by third-party regulations organizations. That is why we suggest implementing additional Google account backup strategies.
You can perform G Suite backup and restore using a few basic built-in mechanisms and a broad range of third-party tools:
- Google Takeout is a basic service allowing you to create an archive of selected G Suite data. Using this service, you can manually create a full data copy or even prepare your files for migration to another cloud.
- Client apps installed on your desktop also allow you to download necessary data for protection or archival needs - for example, Microsoft Outlook allows you to create an offline mail archive.
- External tools and APIs: Google Vault is designed for archival needs, but you can also use it for data backup with basic abilities. There is also a broad range of cloud-based backup tools for G Suite.
For example, MSP360 Backup for G Suite allows you to store mail, documents, and other files’ backup in separate cloud storage of your choice for any desired period.
How to Protect G Suite for Free
There are a few tools you can use to strengthen your data safety at no additional cost. We will briefly overview these approaches for emails and Google Disk-based files since in most cases it is a core of your business data.
The simplest way to create a copy of your emails is to connect the email client app using IMAP protocol (you need to enable it in Gmail preferences). For example, Microsoft Outlook saves emails to PST files that you can copy to another cloud, external drive, or network storage. But a more accurate way is to additionally set up mail archiving, so the mail client could move old emails to a separate file based on some schedule.
Documents, tables, presentations, etc - all these files are stored as regular files in Google Drive. So you can simply install Google Drive desktop client and get the mirror of your working folder on the physical hard drive. This data can be then copied by third-party software to external storage.
After creating a “dump” of your business data, you also need to move these files to external storage so it could be used in case something happens with your PC’s drive.
Summary
G Suite allows you to move most of the business activities to the cloud, but you should also think about any additional data protection layer. You can use free tools to protect G Suite data, but they are feature-limited and require you to manually configure any backup aspect.
When choosing to implement Google account backup or an archival tool, it is better to use specialized cloud-integrated tools or to implement your data copy infrastructure with the use of Google-provided integration mechanisms. You can try our MSP360 Backup for G Suite for free to check whether it meets your business needs. If you have questions left - don’t hesitate to contact us.
Simple. Reliable.
