If you have made the switch to using cloud based services like Google Apps for your business or even just for personal use you probably don’t worry about backing up your data as often as you would if it was sitting on your desktop. It can be easy to think that Google will keep your data safe, but if your account is hacked, Google disables your account or if Google does lose your data, what will you do.
If you are using a number of Google cloud services like Gmail, Drive etc for your personal use or Google Apps for your business, then finding a service that can help backup all of those Google services is essential. How would you survive if your Gmail email disappeared or if all your Drive documents were no longer available? Thankfully there are several cloud based services that you can use to backup your Google cloud based services. Some services only work with Google Apps accounts and some work with both Apps and individual Google accounts. Depending on what you need it is always important to make copies of your cloud based data in the same way you backup your local data.
Spanning
Spanning can backup both Google Apps accounts or individual Google accounts. It costs $40/year and once set up will run automatically to backup your data from Google to their servers. This is a cloud to cloud backup so you don’t have to download anything to your computer. Storage is unlimited so if you have purchased additional storage with Google you don’t have to worry about buying more storage with Spanning. The individual account backs up Gmail, Google Drive & Docs, Google Calendar and Google Contacts. The apps version also does Sites. The only other Google service I wish was included is Picasa.
The price for Spanning is $40/year for individuals or $40/year/user for apps accounts. You can get that for $35/year by using my referral link.
Backupify
Backupify has been around for awhile and backs up Google Apps, Salesforce and personal Google accounts.They can also backup Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Blogger. They offer a free account for personal use that offers weekly backup of up to three services with 1GB of storage. Paid personal accounts start at $4.99/month and includes 5 services, 10GB of storage and daily backups. Google Apps plans start at $3/month/user. For a single user Google apps account that would be $36/year.
CloudAlly
CloudAlly offers backup of Google Apps and personal Google accounts as well as Salesforce, MS Office 365, Yahoo Mail and AWS DynamoDB and SimpleDB. They use Amazon S3 for storage and plans start at $2.49/month for each Gmail/Yahoo Mail account and $2.99/month for each Google Apps user. For personal Google accounts that would be $29.88/year and for a singe Google Apps user $35.88/year.
SysCloudSoft
SysCloudSoft is more for Google Apps users and not individual Google accounts. Prices start at $3/user/month with 35GB of storage per user. If you are an enterprise user with a minimum of 20 users your price per user drops to only $1/user/month. It also looks like you have the option of backing up to your own servers as well as theirs. Definitely a plus if you want your data on your own machines.
Spinbackup
Spinbackup offers Google account backup for both individuals and apps users. Individuals start with a free plan offering 2GB of cloud storage with unlimited backups and restores. Paid accounts start at $2.00/month with 10GB of cloud storage and go up from there. Additional users are $1.00/month/user and additional cloud storage is $0.175/month/GB.
Google Apps Vault
If you are a Google Apps user you could also add the Google Apps Vault to your account. It is an extra $5.00/month/user. This is not an option for individual Google account users so you will need to look at some of the other options above. It also means that Apps users are then trusting Google not only with their data but also the backup, and call me paranoid, but that seems to be wrong.
These some excellent services to help protect either your personal Google account information or your Google Apps data. Using Google it is easy to forget that you need to backup that data as well and keep it safe. I know personally I would be lost if Google all of a sudden decided to close my Google account. Between Gmail, Calendar and Drive I am fairly dependent on Google for my day to day work. I wrote this post because I was researching different ways to backup that data. In the end I have two methods in place to keep most of the data in Google safe. I have InSync to copy my Drive documents to my computer and I decided to sign up with Spanning to backup the data to them.
Do you backup your Google data? How?
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