Spanning Backup Blog

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.

An Activity Stream for Your Google Apps Dashboard

Like lots of companies that use Google Apps, we have multiple people with administrative access. What we don’t have is a one-click way to keep track of what other admins are doing, whether it’s resetting a user’s password, creating a new suborganization, or creating a new email alias (er, “group”). So we built something new and are giving it away for free.

True, you can dig into the Google Apps dashboard and find a list of the individual events in your audit log, but they’re not organized into higher-level activities, and frankly it’s just a little ugly.

The free Spanning Admin Audit Log Viewer is a handy way for you to, well, view your audit log. Activities like “User Settings Updated” or “Group Settings Updated” are listed and can be expanded to reveal their underlying events with a click.

You’ll find the Admin Audit Log Viewer in the new Free Tools section of spanning.com. Add it to your Google Apps domain, check it out, and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Charlie

Announcing Spanning Backup v3.0

After months of development, we’re proud to announce the launch of Spanning Backup for Google Apps v3.0.

The most readily apparent change is a revamped user interface. We’ve studied users’ interactions with Spanning Backup and used our findings to create a simplified, streamlined experience that effectively reduces the distance between you and your data.

We’ve also listened carefully to feedback from Google Apps admin power users, many of whom told us they need to be able to restore data on behalf of their users within seconds. So we’ve revamped the user impersonation function, making it more intelligent, easier to use, and even faster than it was before.

We’ve also integrated our Admin Dashboard into the application itself. Admins now have a single, consolidated view into their backup coverage, 30 days of Google Apps service health history, and their storage usage.

Finally, we’ve done a lot of work below the waterline. We back up terabytes of data for thousands of businesses, and are constantly improving our backend services to maintain our position as the highest-rated backup app on the Google Apps Marketplace.

We’ll be describing the new functionality in Spanning Backup v3.0 in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. 2012 is off to a beautiful start!

How to Assign Spanning Backup Seats to Your Domain Users

1. Go to your Google Apps Admin Dashboard.

2. Click on Spanning Backup under Marketplace Services towards the bottom of the page.

That will take you to this page:

3. Click add next to all of the users you want to back up. As you add users, they will appear in the Paid Seats box to the right.

4. Click the save user access settings button. If you successfully assign all of your paid seats, the number next to Purchased will match the number next to In use, and the number next to Currently selected will be 0. If you don’t want to use all of the seats you paid for right away, that’s fine. Just make sure that the number next to In use is the number of users you want backed up.

You’re done! Backups will automatically run every day for the users you just selected.