Data Backup Digest

G Suite packages together lots of Google tools like Gmail and Drive and provides an enterprise solution. Although Microsoft generally have a firm hold on the enterprise world with their Office package, Google hope that consumers used to their products in the consumer world will bring it over to business.

For the small and medium sized business, G Suite makes for a great choice. Their products work well and often don’t require much training due to how simple they are to use.

However, there is one area where it falls down and that’s in backing up your Google data. In 2011, the Google Data Liberation Front created Google Takeout in order to provide Google users wit ha way to see how much data Googles has about you and have your own copy of it.

Google Takeout pulls together all of your Google data, across platforms like YouTube and Blogger, and compiles it into a single compressed file that can be downloaded. There are a number of benefits to this beyond curiosity. For example, you could export everything from Google Drive and chuck it on a cheaper physical drive to free up your cloud storage. Or you could use it to quickly get to that old attachment from Gmail down the line.

Google Takeout pulls from Gmail, Maps, Android, YouTube, Picasa, and more – any service old and current that Google holds your personal data for. You can see a full list of what is included on your Google Dashboard.

It’s a simple service to use on the service. You sign in to your Google account, head to the Takeout section, and select what services you want to take data from. Next, you choose how you want the archive to be delivered (as a link to your email or as a file to Drive), and the regularity of the archive (this means every two months, not a proper backup, which we’ll come to shortly). Finally, you then select how you want the file to be compressed. You then submit the request and will be notified when the archive is ready.

This is fine as a one off and it’s serviceable as a way to be compliant and see what data Google holds on you. However, it’s poor as an actual backup solution.

This is because the backup process is limited to three per day, which is no good if you need consistent, regular backups of any changing data. As an IT administrator, you can’t automate this task. You would need to login to every user’s account and manually pull their data. That’s just not feasible.

It’s also terrible when it comes to recovery, since the data is stored all in different folders and formats. And remember, it’s separated by user too; that’s not acceptable for business continuity.

Google has also suffered its own privacy issues in the past, where other user’s information was included in Takeout requests. As a business, that’s totally unacceptable.

Instead, look for a backup solution that is going to cover the growth and regulations that your company faces, provides automation and speed, and lets you recover everything with ease.