Is a backup a good idea? If so, which one?

[Brian-Barrett]

My nonprofit has a board of directors (of course) and part of their work recently is to create a Document Retention policy. They are wanting to know specifics about how long documents, emails, etc are retained by Google when they're deleted.

We're using a Workspace for Nonprofits account and do not currently pay extra for Vault.  Should we?

Do we even need additional backup as I'm sure Google themselves takes precautions against data loss?

Are there other backup providers that you recommend?

[Mikmik]

Eucational, nonprofit, go with Cloudally

[dan_davenport]

We ended up purchasing a Synology NAS (https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/active_backup_google_workspace) with no drives, and we're using 4TB drives we had on hand (not recommend by Synology) to backup about 6TB of staff and shared drives (hand selected). It's a pretty cheap peace of mind. We can restore anything in those drives for 30 days, even non-google docs. While I hope to never use it, at least we're prepared for some sort of unanticipated disaster and it was dirt cheap. 

[b_gorsky1]

@dan_davenport I was strongly considering using the Synology as well. How's it working?

Have you tested restoring data? Do you know how you would go about it?

[cryptochrome]

@b_gorsky1 @danu If you are using an "offline" backup solution such as a Synology, always keep in mind that these options don't "understand" Google. When you are backing up to a local NAS, you will lose all Google Drive metadata that might be attached to a file (and the things that make Google Drive useful). Such as version history, comments, approval workflows and all the metadata stuff that was recently introduced (custom fields for files, workflow automations etc.). When restoring files from your local NAS backup, all of that metadata is no longer present. 

This is why we always recommend our customers to use a cloud based backup solution that taps right into Google's APIs for data backup. These tools retain all metadata and functionality. 

[b_gorsky1]

@cryptochrome Excellent point. 

[dan_davenport]

It works as advertised via the recovery portal but as mentioned by @cryptochrome you're not restoring a google document. It restores in another file format (doc = word, sheets = excel. etc). So it is only useful in the sense that you don't lose your core data. You would lose google functionality. For us that is enough though compared to the cost of all of the cloud solutions. In fact, our concern isn't really the google docs as much as other formats that folks save in their drives. Since we no longer support local storage for everyone (everything is in Drive) we felt like we should have some sort of backup that doesn't rely on Google, and Synology fits the bill quite well. 

We also don't backup student's work, just staff and core shared drives. We still rely on version history or vault to restore student documents. But we have a solid backup of teacher/admin/secretarial work on the Synology server.  We also still maintain traditional file storage (Windows file server/VEEAM backup) for critical files like finances that we don't store in Google.

[b_gorsky1]

Thanks for the info @dan_davenport . 

What about emails? Do you back those up? I'm guessing it would restore to some generic mailbox format like mbox.

[dan_davenport]

I think you're correct about how it would back up gmail, but we don't have that setup. We have retention policies set in vault so it seems unlikely that we'd lose anything critical in email. In fact, we generally try not to retain too much of that to avoid any kind of FERPA mistakes.