I've been looking for a cloud backup provider for a bit, but to be honest, I've been busy, other things on my plate, etc, etc (always an excuse!). I've also been looking at implementing Chromebooks because of their simplicity and the cost - but of course you need G-Suite for that. So, even though we're fully signed up and committed to Office365 I pushed through an application and this got agree a couple of months back by the nice people at Google - why can't we somehow use both?. And, the 'Unlimited Storage' on Google Drive just kept shouting at me from the back of my mind over recent weeks along the lines of.... "come on, you can do something useful with that!"

My backup system uses Veeam (which, is great, albeit a tad expensive in support which usually results in "That's a Microsoft problem - raise a call with them" - but, that's another story) - and this backups locally to the server itself, which gets copied onto LTO-8 tape (call me old fashioned, but I like tape and the importance of an 'Air Gapped' backup helps me sleep at night) and then these backups get copied to a Synology NAS unit in another building - D2D2T2D if you will. But, how about pushing up to a cloud backup as well....?

So, today I finally got around to it. Having already setup SSO with Azure and to self provision G-Suite accounts a while back (need to do more, but it works for now), I setup a non user account in AD which replicated nicely through to G-Suite.

I created another shared directory on the NAS unit and had Veeam set this as another backup repository. Next was to installed the 'Cloud Sync' package on the Synology unit which enables you to sync a folder on the NAS with a whole array of Cloud Drive providers - Google Drive being one of them; set this up with the credentials of my non-user backup account I created earlier.

Final step was to add additional Backup Copy jobs in Veeam that copied the backups to the new repository on the Synology Unit - remembering to enable encryption on the files that are created. For now, I'm just including the really really important stuff... SIMS, Domain Controllers to recover AD, Cashless Catering, etc - just the really necessary stuff we would need in the case of absolute loss. And off it ran..... uploading the files as they are created in the new repository to the Google Drive of my backup user account.

Of course, I'll be adding details of this process in our GDPR matrix showing clearly the flow of data and logging all the necessary privacy statements that Google have in place with G-Suite for Education.

So, thank you Google for giving us schools this extra capacity and I promise I won't turn it into a digital dumping ground of stuff no one really needs but keep this for that all important stuff we just can't do without!

Pete