Archive for February, 2012

Spanning’s Latest Free Tool: Undelete for Google Calendar

Hopelessness. Anger. Frustration. Dismay. If you’ve ever accidentally deleted an event—or lots of events—from Google Calendar, you know the feeling. Because, as Google’s help article on recovering deleted events says, “Once an event is deleted, its full details can’t be recovered.” Bummer.

But you know what? Once an event is deleted, sometimes it can be recovered. Or at least it could be if someone would just write an app that could talk to the Google Calendar API, fetch a list of all recently-deleted calendar events, and let you choose which ones to undelete. That data sticks around for a while before it’s permanently gone, so it’s just a matter of getting at it.

Knowing that it’s technically possible, we’ve wanted to write that app for years. Well, we finally did. And today we’re releasing it—for free!

Spanning Undelete for Google Calendar does just what it says on the tin: it undeletes events that have been recently deleted from Google Calendar.

Now before you get too excited, let me point out that there are lots of things it doesn’t do. Undelete can’t recover entire deleted calendars, restore corrupted events, restore to a point in time, or rescue docs, folders, email, or contacts. To be sure, Undelete is no substitute for Backup, which does all of these things and more. But in a pinch, it can be a life saver.

If you’re a Google Calendar user, just sign in at https://freetools.spanning.com/undelete. And if you’re a Google Apps admin you can install it for your whole domain on the Google Apps Marketplace.

Written by Charlie Wood

Bay Cove Human Services Frees Up Help Desk with Spanning Backup

[Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in a new Q&A series with Spanning customers. Keep an eye out for new posts to learn more about how our customers are using Google Apps, how they’re using Spanning for backup, and tips they have for other businesses looking to “Go Google”.]

Hilary Croach, CIO
Bay Cove Human Services

Why did you choose Spanning Backup for Google Apps?

Spanning Backup gave us the ability to protect against our most frequent restore issue: user mistakes. We now have individual user access to the restore process as well as administrators, freeing up our Help Desk for more complex issues.

Tell us a bit about your setup process with Spanning Backup? What is the good, bad and ugly of the setup?

Setup is as easy as turning it on. The bigger challenge is educating our users about how to setup their own backup.

Did you consider any other backup providers, and what do you think about the other options out there?

When we were looking a number of months ago – Spanning stood out particularly in their accessibility and willingness to talk about the specific needs of our agency.

What prompted you to back up your businesses Google Apps data initially?

As we move more of our unstructured, mission critical data to from a network-based Microsoft paradigm (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) to Google Apps, we have an obligation to protect user data at least as well as we did on our network.

What new features would be most useful to your business?

Granular Calendar and Contacts restore – point in time restore of the whole Calendar or Contacts databases is useful for disaster recovery, but not for the majority of our problems, which are accidentally deleting individual events or contacts.