Google Workspace and Backups & File Retention

[Gobstopper]

Evening all,

 

The headteacher of our secondary school would like to invest further into the Google Cloud and migrate everything to Google Drive, Classroom etc. I am completely happy to support this decision if we do things properly.

 

My main concern is around what a Google technical support agent told me and what I have read in supporting documentation around backups. We currently have Barracuda backing up our Office 365 tenancy (SharePoint, OneDrive etc.)

 

In the support documentation I have read it states that file retention on the Google platfrom is 55 days which assumes the file lives in the recycle bin for 30 days, you then have an additional 25 days to recover a perminant deletion. Obviously, if a file is deleted before the 30 day period then the 25 days begins from that point which means there will be less time to recover data. When I quizzed the Google technical support they confirmed this and when I asked about backups, they escilated to 2nd line which I never heard back from and the rep said that Google has no opinion on the matter of backups which I thought was crazy.

 

I have a quote from Redstor to provide a cloud to cloud backup of Workspace but my headteacher is now being told a backup in completely unnecessary on the Google Platform, this has come from a colleague that she has worked with in the past.

 

I guess my question is, have I been misinformed on the requirement of a backup solution for Google Workspace? If I have then great, it will make the job easier and save a lot of money but I wanted to ask those who have done this move already.

 

Cheers as always!

[yac2016]

You would need to backup both Microsoft and Google Workspace, especially any critical mailboxes or any data that you deem critical.

 

The built in backup is not sufficient for a disaster recovery situation and both Google and Microsoft state in there terms and conditions.

 

MS are about to release a backup solution, looks very expensive though.

 

There are ways to backup these services.

 

Look at Datto, Barracuda, per user per month and they will usually backup all shared drives and student data:

 

Think Google already had a issue where personal user data had gone missing andbthey advisee users they should have a copy of their own data.

 

Also the DFE cyber Security guidelines stated a 3-2-1 backup of all your data whether this is cloud or not. Can you safely say you Google data is fully protected?

[rogerdnixon]

We have Workspace across our Trust - ~20000 users and we do have backup - we use AFI Backup which works well. We have it for peace of mind and because you should back stuff up. However, every year I'd say there are single figure restores of files or emails - none at all in the past few months. So its used rarely - but has been very useful in a few specific situations.

[jthompson]

Yes, you do need to back it up. You may decide to just do the staff accounts though, because cost per user per month is challenging calculus when including all of the students.

 

We're backing up Workspace staff accounts using Datto here. Very few restores ever done from it, but it's there to restore stuff in bulk in case some major error or incident were to occur. Recovering stuff in bulk is not really possible using just the first-party Workspace tools.

 

Google Vault gives you e-discovery of long-deleted files and emails but there's no snapshotting or restore capabilities there.