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.

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

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!

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.

Tom Pace,
Venture Technology Groups

Why did you choose Spanning Backup for Google Apps?

Even though Google’s servers should not lose information, it’s always possible. To easily backup our data on Amazon’s servers as well as Google’s is a great solution to achieve backup redundancy.

Spanning provides the ability to access data without using the Google interface. When I was told this, that was a huge selling point because when servers are down, and if everything is stored online, the ability to access our information is critical.

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

Yes. We considered about 3 other providers. No other option seemed to be as ‘hands-off’ as Spanning. Spanning is a great deal for what you get, and the customer service is fantastic as well.

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

It was pretty much as simple as informing the team at Spanning which users to backup.

That’s it. Done.

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

More than any other reason, it was risk mitigation. Pure and simple.

Have you ever restored data using Spanning Backup? How would you describe the process?

Fortunately, I have not only had to restore any data for testing purposes. It is not a complicated process, and this feature is paramount in selling the cloud strategy to old-school colleagues.

What new features would be most useful to your business?

I would like to be able to access backed up files without going through Google Apps – in case there is an outage and I cannot access Google. If there were a way to search for a file that was needed and then download it directly through Spanning, it could be very beneficial. It would also be helpful to be able to search for files to backup.

How does Google Apps fit within your organization IT/cloud strategy?

The less I have to manage in house, the better. That said, I need to ensure that data being stored off-site is available after a disaster strikes.

How much of your business’s content/data is in Google Apps?

Currently, it’s mostly email, calendars, contacts and some product spec sheets. It’s a big shift for users to get them using the spreadsheet, presentation and word processing apps. I think that once there is better email/docs integration, more users will use it. The docs need to resemble local drives that users are familiar with in order to appeal to many populations.

He writes about the highly-anticipated (and often-rumored) Google cloud storage product nicknamed GDrive, and what Google will need to do to make it successful. There’s all kinds of potential for a really awesome product here, and we’re crossing our fingers they get it right.

Click here to read the full article at Mashable.

1. Collections missing from “My collections”
2. Collection suddenly missing
3. Most of my collections are gone. Not all, just most. They were shared with others and they cannot see them either.
4. My collections disappeared
5. All of my collections are suddenly missing!
6. Collections have disappeared or become un-nested, docs disappeared from collections
7. My Collections are missing
8. Where have my collections gone?
9. I just looked through all the posts and see that it is not an isolated problem. I have LOST ALL MY FOLDERS.
10. I have clicked on my collections or spreadsheets, and I have lost them. They were erased. How can I recover them?

Bas points out that this “will not help the [original poster], but it may be helpful if someone at GDocs should look into the matter again.”

In the mean time, we strongly suggest backing up Google Docs with a system like Spanning Backup that backs up not only docs but also folders.

Folders in Google Docs

The moral of this story is that your backup system needs to back up not only your data (documents, spreadsheets, email, etc.) but also your metadata, which is data about your data, like the folders into which you’ve organized your documents.

Unlike our competition, Spanning Backup retains not only each of your Google Apps documents, but also information about the folders (collections) to which each document belongs and the hierarchical structure of those folders. And while this may sound esoteric, it turns out to be critically important.

Our company uses Google Docs for just about everything, including HR information. Documents are organized into folders for each employee, and further into folders for each department. Each employee folder contains some standard documents: Resume.pdf, Signed Offer Letter.pdf, etc.

Folders in Spanning Backup

If our backup system didn’t retain the folder structure of our documents, it would be losing important data every day. We’d be left with a jumble of documents all with the same title, and if we ever needed to restore all of them at once, we’d be left to sort them out manually.

With any nontrivial number of documents, this could be a nightmare. But Spanning Backup retains metadata and understands how to use it during the restore process, so documents are backed up and restored¹ with their folder structure intact.

Again, this may sound like an obvious approach but it turns out to be a competitive differentiator for us.

¹ As always, all Spanning Backup restores are non-destructive.

Adam Barciszewski,
AnnounceMedia

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that while we rely our IT departments for great support when we’re having a problem with a device or system, the IT department also needs high-quality support from the vendors they select to help them better manage and serve their end users.

Adam Barciszewski from AnnounceMedia balanced his assessment of backup solutions between not only finding the right technology fit for his business, but finding the right customer support fit.

Here’s Adam’s story about how he chose Spanning for backup.

1. Why did you choose Spanning Backup for Google Apps?

After evaluating several solutions and finding that Spanning Backup met our needs, the clincher was the staff. They were all prompt and personable. When I bring up ideas or issues, I honestly feel that Spanning listens and cares.

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

Yes we did. Without mentioning names, we found their UI’s cumbersome and their feature set incomplete.

3. What prompted you to back up your business’s Google Apps data initially?

We were looking to be as redundant as possible. While the chance of data loss with Google Apps is small, it does happen. We cannot afford data loss.

Who can, really?

4. What new features would be most useful to your business?

I would like to see an admin suite with reports I can have generated that give me a high-level view of backup status for each user. I would also like more control of each user without “impersonating them”.

5. What criteria would you recommend someone consider when selecting a backup provider for Google Apps?

The most important detail to consider in my mind is: will the company you pick be reliable enough to help you when you need to be pulled out of the fire?

I feel that Spanning Backup’s staff will be there when I need them.

“Congrats on being chosen as an Apps Marketplace Staff Pick! This designation is awarded to apps which have a combination of great functionality and ease of use due to their deep integrations with Google Apps.”

Needless to say, we’re pretty stoked to be recognized by the Google staff. We’ve been listed in the “try popular & notable apps” section in a rotation for quite some time now, but it means a great deal to us to not only be popular but to be endorsed by the very people that make Google Apps.

On top of that, we’re excited to be in the company of other great, top-notch apps like SmartSheet, Mavenlink, Nimble, and Solve 360 to mention a few of the other apps on the Google Staff Picks list.

In case you missed it, we were also chosen as a founding member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps last month along with SherpaTools, Okta, Expensify, Insightly, RunMyProcess, and SmartSheet. As a company that prides itself as being business-class, we are thrilled that the Google Apps community is recognizing us one of the top-tier products in the marketplace.

Thanks Google Apps Team!