One of the biggest concerns for businesses moving to cloud software is protecting data. While it is very unlikely that Google and Google Drive will lose any of your data, it makes sense to back it up in case a user deletes it.
Email has options that are easy and quick to activate. Email archive service Google Vault for Google Apps is well priced and provides businesses with peace of mind by recovering email removed maliciously or by mistake.
Documents, which in the Google Apps suite are stored in Google Drive, don’t have the same luxury. Google may expand Google Vault to cover documents in the future. In the meantime there are third-party applications that can back up your documents for you.
Backupify
Backupify has been the poster child for backing up Google Apps and other cloud software for a while. The service is very easy to use, competitively priced and backs up your most important data.
Backupify works by gaining access to the domain and copying across data in Gmail, Docs/Drive, Contacts, Calendar and Sites. Any changes in the data are backed up daily. Premium versions of Backupify will look to sync a number of times in a 24-hour period.
Backups are easy to restore. You can log into Backupify and search for specific documents or other data and download or restore these items into your Google Apps account. What makes the product even better is that you don’t need to be a Google Apps admin to use it. Standard users can login to Backupify and look and restore this data for themselves as well.
Spanning
Spanning Sync is very similar to Backupify. It backs up all Google Apps and Drive data using a similar, simple interface. It also has options to restore and access your data through the service.
There are some points to make when using tools like this for your business. These programs make copies of your data and not actual backups which breaks the sharing settings for each document. This means that restored files won’t be shared with the same people as the original file.
(An explanation: documents in Google Drive have a unique web link. Files restored from either Backupify or Spanning receive new links. People who could access the original document don’t automatically have access to the link for the new document.)
Cheaper plans have restrictions on the amount of data backed up and how often backups occur. Backup frequency is at a minimum every 24 hours; in more expensive plans your data is synced every few hours.