G Suite for backups

[Sheridan]

Is anyone using their standard educational G Suite storage for their backups?

 

If so, what do you use, software or Google Drive File synch and scripts etc? I’ve tested using a specific backup account with a backup script and it seems to work, although quite slow with the council connection!

 

I’m looking to move primary school backups (usually less than 2tb in total) to their G Suite storage plan so interested in what’s worked for other people

[Steve21]

I know it's a slight off-track to the question, as I've seen a few threads on here regarding this (Some seem to use things like robocopy/rsync etc, while others are doing the full image/backup file), but I just wondered what's the actual legal/terms status around this?

 

Seeing it's not actually a user who's using the storage is it a bit of a grey area, or has anyone found anything that say it's ok? With 15TB of legacy data to store somewhere would save a lot of cash on storage devices

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[Sheridan]

I know it's a slight off-track to the question, as I've seen a few threads on here regarding this (Some seem to use things like robocopy/rsync etc, while others are doing the full image/backup file), but I just wondered what's the actual legal/terms status around this?

 

Seeing it's not actually a user who's using the storage is it a bit of a grey area, or has anyone found anything that say it's ok? With 15TB of legacy data to store somewhere would save a lot of cash on storage devices

 

Many thanks,

Steve

 

Good point, but would Google care that an Admin created a separate account to store some data, it’s their data after all just stored under a separate account for convenience?

[Steve21]

Aye I totally agree, and would be an awesome place for backups/archived data. Just a bit wary in regards to getting a schools whole org blocked or something stupid if they do deem it "abusive" for lack of a better phrase Just wasn't sure if anyone had found anything specific to it before in terms etc

 

Personally I was looking at OneDrive for similar (being MS side ), and they have very small (well at least in terms of backups) file size limits of 100Gb last time I looked, so the idea of doing a full backup image of a big server wasn't going to happen. So was playing around doing a robocopy over to the backup server where a VM was running doing the sync etc

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[aicrd]

I'm currently using Veeam to backup my Hyper-V host to G Suite. I just have the Backup and Sync client installed on a server and have Veeam use that as a backup repository.

 

One thing to keep in mind is the caps Google puts on uploads. I believe its capped to 750GB a day. Shouldn't be a problem if you're only doing small stuff.

[Sheridan]

750gb a day wouldn't be a problem, apart from the initial upload. The daily upload would be a matter of a few gig at the most.

 

It amazing how we now think 'oh a cap of 750gb a day, thats a bit inconvenient' I remember backing up servers to quarter inch tape on 'huge' 150Mb tapes.

 

And its free!

[Edu-IT]

Can anyone explain this limitation? What would be the negative?

 

If you use Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows with Veeam Backup & Replication, you cannot import a backup residing in Microsoft OneDrive in the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

[dhicks]

Is anyone using their standard educational G Suite storage for their backups?

 

We're just starting to do the opposite - sync a Google Drive folder or Shared Drive to a local file server, then back that up with Veeam. Staff or pupils can access their files via Google Drive or, if needed, install the Drive File Stream client. We have this working for our "media" storage drive, 3.5 TB(!) of images and videos - staff seem to be happy to access via ChromeOS / web browsers, we haven't had much use through the File Stream client yet.

[Katy]

We just use an Azure storage account, set the access tier to Archive and it costs about £1.35 to have 1TB there for a month (Archive tier means it's got to be there at least 180 days, if you delete it or alter it before the 180 days is up you still have to pay for the 180 days)

[TwistedHelixis]

I do it both ways. I use Google Backup and sync (sync disabled) to backup local server files to the cloud, and Cubebackup to backup cloud files to a local server :0) been doing this for ages.

 

I also have Spanning backup that backs the lot up to their servers

[Edu-IT]

We just use an Azure storage account, set the access tier to Archive and it costs about £1.35 to have 1TB there for a month (Archive tier means it's got to be there at least 180 days, if you delete it or alter it before the 180 days is up you still have to pay for the 180 days)

Do you mean you have to have 1TB there for 180 days - or whatever storage capacity you need? Or that the backup taken today for example has to stay there for 180 days?

 

Looks expensive to restore via this route?

Edited September 6, 2020 by Edu-IT

[Steve21]

Do you mean you have to have 1TB there for 180 days - or whatever storage capacity you need? Or that the backup taken today for example has to stay there for 180 days?

 

Looks expensive to restore via this route?

 

Normally with archived storage it's just the fact it's not supposed to be accessed often, as in only archive not your main backup space. The actual storage is whatever you pay for.

 

For example, if you had a rotating backup of 100GBs per day, even if you wiped the backup every day, you'd still have to pay for that 100GB worth of data for 180 days. (So 18TB worth at certain points)

 

However, lets say you did a 100GB backup per month, and kept 6 points, you'd only ever pay for 600GB worth

 

If that makes sense? And yes normally it's expensive to recover, but again it's for oh shi... cases, not normal backup with archive storage That's more cold storage you want

 

Steve

[Sonic007]

We've been looking at this....Looks quite cost effective..

 

http://www.cubebackup.com

[TwistedHelixis]

We've been looking at this....Looks quite cost effective..http://www.cubebackup.com

 

They also do educational discounts

[Michael]

If you're talking about user data or shared areas, why not just operate from within File Stream? Once it's up there, everyone has an Explorer interface so the learning curve's small.

 

Uploading is a big task, but day to day, personnel are only accessing small parts of the whole data share.

 

If you're talking about archiving, the only other limitation is 400,000 objects - consider an object a file or the folder itself. A singular file can be no larger than 5TB.

[Sheridan]

Has anyone ever used Google Drive File Stream to use the mapped drive as a store? Veeam Backup won't use it as its not a SMB or ReFs formatted drive

 

I suppose I could script it, but the upload limitations might scupper that

[aicrd]

Not used file stream before but my reasoning behind using Sync instead was that in the event of a VM failure I could restore it pretty quickly instead of downloading it from G Drive as its all locally cached. I think File Stream also caches locally but not sure it could handle 500+ GB of VMs.

[TwistedHelixis]

my reasoning behind using Sync instead was that in the event of a VM failure I could restore it pretty quickly

But if there is a problem with the vm, will that not have been synced also. Think this was a reason why I disabled the sync part of the backup and sync software.

[aicrd]

No. Veeam backs up every 24 hours for a total of 7 days so I always have at least 7 days worth of restore points in both G Drive and stored locally.

[dhicks]

Has anyone ever used Google Drive File Stream to use the mapped drive as a store?

 

I tried ExpanDrive, with much the same results as you - it doesn't mount the drive as a "regular" file system (there was a specific term but I can't remember it), so Veeam doesn't see it.

 

I did think of trying with rclone, which I've used to mount various cloud-based file system on Linux, but I've not tried it with Windows yet.