What is the value of a tweet? How much does Yelp value a review? As a participant in the social media economy, how much value does your participation create for companies like Facebook and LinkedIn?

These questions came to mind recently as we had a deep discussion at Backupify about the value of data in the cloud. Sometimes people ask me why they should backup their cloud data. The answer that I give comes from asking thousands of Backupify customers why they do it – because the data is valuable, and it is always important to protect valuable assets.

Quantifying the value of data to a business is relatively easy. For customers who use our Backup for Google Apps or Backup for Salesforce products to protect their corporate data, it boils down to three basic concerns:

1. How difficult it would be to recreate that data
2. How much revenue would be lost if the data was lost
3. How much productivity would be lost if important data could not be accessed

The value of social data (for both consumers and businesses) is a little bit harder to quantify. We decided to take a shot at it by building off some publicly available information to figure out what social data, which social media companies, and what social media actions are the most valuable. The results are in posted in the Backupify Social Data Value Infographic below.

We plotted the data in two different ways. The first is by average per-user value, which of course has Facebook as king of the hill. The second plot shows how many users a service would require to reach a $10 billion valuation. As you can see, most of the companies are unlikely to ever get that big.

So take a look, and let us know what you think. Are Yelp reviews really worth more than tweets? Who should we have put on the graph that didn’t make it? Which pieces of social media are over or under valued? Leave a comment, write a post, or just tweet @backupify with your thoughts.

Click for full size version

I should be clear that the video you see below is really me really deleting my entire email account. This is my business account for Backupify, which is more than 2 years old, and contains important emails about fundraising, key partnerships, employee hiring, and many sensitive and important business matters. After I did this, I was actually sweating. It’s nerve wracking to think about how hard it would be to reconstruct all that data, and how lost I would be without it. Not to worry though, Backupify came through and restored everything with the click of a button.

One third of all data loss is user error. That doesn’t go away when you move to the cloud. Add to that a world where more and more third party apps are accessing your data via APIs and any bug in any one of them could cause data loss. So on World Backup Day, be sure to backup your stuff – on your PC, on your mobile device, in the cloud, or wherever else it may be. So Happy World Backup Day. Celebrate by watching me delete my entire Gmail account.

Deleting and Restoring (with Backupify) Entire Gmail Account from Backupify on Vimeo.

Put more simply, can my wife inherit my Gmail account when I die?

This is more than an academic exercise: I have a number of online accounts and services that send primary notifications to my Gmail account. It’s entirely possible my wife may not be able to access my Health Savings Account or Roth IRA in a timely fashion without access to my Gmail account.

The easy answer is to leave credentials to my account in a place my wife knows to find them in the event of my untimely demise. The only problem with that plan is impersonating a Gmail user is a violation of the Gmail terms of service. Google is unlikely to know the impersonation is happening, and unlikely to care in the majority of cases, but on the off chance they find out my wife is logging into my account after my death, they can suspend or terminate the account at their discretion. This more or less obviates the whole reason for giving my wife access in the first place.

Gmail is a service, not a product, and my use of that service is non-transferrable. If I die without giving my wife my Gmail password, the account will be automatically deleted nine months after my date of last login. If I do give her the password, I run the risk of Google deleting the account the second they realize my wife is impersonating me. Google is far from alone in this, and actually has some of the more well considered data privacy and ownership policies out there.

So, is there a way to bequeath my Gmail account to my wife? After a fashion, yes.

My wife can apply for access to the contents of my Gmail account after my death, but there are some moderately strenuous legal hurdles for her to jump, not least of which is A) having received a message from my Gmail account before, B) a copy of my death certificate and C) a court order showing she’s entitled to the account. And even if she gives all of that, it’s possible Google could deny her request at its discretion.

Now, these are entirely reasonable privacy protections on Google’s part. For all Google knows, my wife may be a suspect in my murder (not that any jury would convict; I will totally have had it coming), and giving her access could muck up a criminal investigation.

Even if my wife gets the contents of my Gmail account, she won’t get the account proper. She won’t be able to send or receive mail from the account, let alone use it to confirm transfer of, say, our automatic bill payments from my account to her own. Again, that’s a perfectly reasonable stance on Google’s part, but it leaves a great gaping use case problem for those of us that employ Google Oauth to access other critical services.

My wife doesn’t care a whit about getting my Gmail correspondence, by and large, but she cares a great deal about the Picasa photos (especially the ones uploaded via Google+ through my Droid smartphone) of our daughters. Eventually, my wife can get hold of those, but it probably won’t be easy and almost certainly won’t be fast (unless she breaks the rules and simply pretends to be me).

And what if I don’t want my wife to get access to my digital data? I obviously wouldn’t bequeath her my password, but she could nonetheless apply for and possibly be granted the contents of my accounts as my legal beneficiary. If she moves quickly (as in, before the nine month deadline is up) she could get all the data I don’t want her to have.

So what’s the answer? Simple: Treat my virtual assets the same as my non-virtual ones.

If I own my data, I can establish its disposition in my will the same as I would my car, my house, my investments and my comic book collection. My online services should have the facilities and the policies to recognize any data bequests and beneficiaries I establish beforehand.

This is a use case in desperate need of address, and not just in the small-scale scenario of my wife outliving me. What happens if I die without giving my business partner rights to my Gmail account, from which I conduct occasional customer correspondence? What if my business goes under, and a creditor claims our intellectual assets as part of the bankruptcy firesale? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and online services should have policies and processes in place before I die to establish the chain of ownership of my data.

In the future, we’ll all need to name a digital beneficiary. Online services should offer that nomination today. Until then, hope you have a good backup plan.

One of the more intriguing bleeding-edge technocultural concepts floating around these days is prosthetic memory, which is to say memories and knowledge you rely upon that you yourself did not directly learn or experience. In more blunt terms, we’re talking about Wikipedia, only in such a form that you browse the content so easily and so often (say, via your never-out-of-reach smartphone) that the line between what Wikipedia knows and what you know starts to blur.

The trick to making memory prosthetics really work is to move beyond the mere curation of information — Google’s goal to organize the world’s information, as embodied by Google Search — to analyzing and re-organizing that information, as with a product like Apple’s Siri. Don’t Google “coffee shops cambridge mass”; ask Siri “where is the nearest coffee shop” and let the system infer your need for a location-based response. Now, Siri is a pretty rudimentary mashup of voice recognition, Wolfram Alpha‘s language parser, and the old-fashioned I’m Feeling Lucky search button. But even that basic utility is already pretty extraordinary — and already something upon which it’s easy to become dependent.

As Dominic Basulto writes for Futurelab:

“We are, indeed, creating a type of second brain made possible by basic programming skills. A whole group of sites – Screenr, Google Reader, Diigo, delicious, Instapaper, Evernote, Pinterest, and Social Cast – are becoming part of a massive second brain that is able to establish relationships between all the content that we are creating online with different Web services.”

Now we can argue about whether this is healthy — Patton Oswalt famously lamented the flowering of geek culture, as it is fueled by having second-brain resources that make geekhood easy to attain. Right now, any 18 year-old can get every inside reference in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One without ever having lived through the 1980s nerd culture it’s riffing. Ready Player One probably doesn’t get published if the editor doesn’t know Wikipedia is there to make the book accessible to younger (or less nerdy) demographics. Healthy or not, the second brain is here, and it’s mainstream.

So what happens when you don’t own your second brain?

The recent anti-SOPA Blackout saw a world of school kids go nuts when deprived of Wikipedia for just a day. Granted, Wikipedia’s a public resource that, by design, no single person owns. But what about the Pinterest stream you use to make notes for your next novel? Or the Remember The Milk task list you use to keep your job, chores and hobbies on track? Could you survive the loss of Evernote, Dropbox, or Gmail?

Reductio ad (not so) absurdum: How is a Wikipedia outage different than a stroke? In both cases, an unforeseen event robs you of vital recollections and productive functions, at least temporarily. If your memory prosthetic fails, it’s almost the same as a failure of true memory.

Taken the point one step further, Evernote or Remember the Milk or Instapaper aren’t much different than the organ harvesters from Repo Men, who can reclaim your prosthetic liver if you don’t make your payments. This is not to accuse any online service of malicious intent, but to remind you that they provide services, not assets. You don’t own them, and should they be discontinued, it’s often unclear (and equally unlikely) that you’ll retain rights to the data you store in them.

We’re renting memory prosthetics these days, we don’t own them. The need for a clear data ownership policy is more obvious than ever. If Gmail or Pinterest or Delicious ever shuts down, you should have the right and the means to rebuild your second brain on a new service. As our memory prosthetics become more sophisticated, the need for data ownership rights increases exponentially. For those of us already married to our online data minds, the need for data ownership rights is immediate and paramount.

In other words, hope you have a good backup plan.

Google owns everything.

More specifically, between Gmail, Picasa, the remnants of Buzz, Google Reader, Chrome, Android, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Voice, Gtalk, Google Apps domains and — above all — Google Search, Google already has all the data and the platforms that Facebook is trying to connect and integrate. All Google has to do is steal a page from the classic Microsoft Windows playbook and “embrace and extend” all these distinct products into one cohesive social experience — and one that you simply can’t get away from on the contemporary version of MS Windows, also known as “the Internet.”

You can see this vision at work already with the Google-wide style redesign to match Google+ and the unification of Google’s privacy policies. Google is merging the underpinnings of all its products, and that means Google+ will be everywhere sooner rather than later.

So what’s the tenth/second reason we’ll all be on Google+ a year from now? The best reason, really: You can export all your Google+ data really easily. As Caleb Garling summarizes in the Tom’s report:

“Google has provided users with an obvious and quick way to export each aspect of your data: photos, profile information, stream data, Circles and Contacts. And should you so choose, you can click over to your Account Settings and, front and center, find the option to hide or delete your account.”

Pair that up with the ever-improving Google Takeout service, and Google at least appears to be approaching data liberation with serious and respectful intent. That’s a good thing, and while it almost certainly ranks dead last amongst the reasons why Google+ will give Facebook a real run for its social money, Google’s export options may be the slight edge it needs to ultimately win the social war.

During the development process, I spent a lot of time talking to I.T. managers about why they wanted a Gmail backup tool. Below are the top 4 reasons, based on what I’ve heard through the years from I.T. managers, about why they want a Google Apps backup.

1. One third of all data loss is user error, and that doesn’t go away when you move to the cloud. Like most I.T. departments, they just don’t fully trust their users.

2. “Sync” is confusing. I hear I.T. managers all the time say things like “I’m worried my CEO is going to install some new app on his iphone that is meant to sync his email, calendar, or contacts. There are a bunch of these apps on the market, I don’t know who wrote them, but some sync programs delete things in other spots if they are deleted in one spot. If he accidentally loses an email, or his contact list, I just want to go quickly restore it.”

3. API access and add-ons. With all the third party tools accessing this data, if any one of them has a problem it could mess things up. Having a backup means you worry less about that. You want to be prepared if a tool accidentally affects your email and causes a deletion.

4. Data control – email is a critical business application, and some I.T. managers fully trust Google, but are worried that the only copy of this important business asset exists outside of their control. Backupify provides the control of their Gmail data that helps them sleep better at night.

New markets are interesting because you can watch ideas spread. Two years ago, Gmail backup seemed like a small niche business, but as more and more companies are going Google, I.T. administrators want to keep their workflows, tools, and best practices from their Exchange environments in place. Backupify helps with that goal.

All it takes for Backupify to archive your Google Chats is for you to enable IMAP for chats in your Gmail account. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Log in to your Gmail account
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then select “Mail Settings”
3. Select the “Labels” tab in the Settings page
4. Locate the listing for “Chats” and then select the checkbox to “Show in IMAP”
5. Chats will be included in your next scheduled backup; if you can’t wait, just use the Backup Now button to initiate a Gmail backup immediately

You can view your backup Google Chats within the Gmail archive.

You can use the Backupify search bar to search for chats using the “Chat with <user_name>” query. To view all your chats, search for the “Chats” label.

Related articles

• Your Gmail Backup Strategy: Part 3 – Peace of Mind (backupify.com)
• Check out what’s new at Backupify – Added administrative controls and more (backupify.com)
• All Google Chat Now Uses Google+ Circles (readwriteweb.com)

In the article, Fallows gives us a detailed account of the trauma he and his wife Debb went through when her Gmail account got hacked. Not only did the hacker send out emails from Debb’s account saying that Debb had been mugged on a trip in Madrid (and that she was in urgent need of money), but the hacker also permanently deleted Debb’s six years worth of invaluable data.

To illustrate the gravity of that deletion, he says in the article:

“Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone. All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased. It had not just been put in the ‘Trash’ folder but permanently deleted.”   

While I personally hope that this never happens to anyone, I know full well that the world does not work as I want it to. Disaster nearly always strikes without warning. Users can take all precautionary measures to protect themselves, choosing strong passwords and changing them on a regular basis and so on and so forth. But you know what? Debb did that too. Her password was judged as “strong” when she first chose it for use with Gmail, and we all know how that turned out. No defense is perfect, and any account can eventually be hacked.

This brings me directly to my motivation to start Backupify: Peace of mind.

I started this company not just to provide a backup for your Google Apps or other online services, I built Backupify to provide peace of mind to users in the event of disaster, be it accidental user deletion, hacked accounts or even temporary unavailability.

When I think of Backupify, I think of insurance — insurance for my car, my house and my health. I do not wait to buy insurance until after I get into a car accident. I buy it in advance to protect myself from the consequences of such events. The same rule applies to backing up my Gmail. So ask yourself this question: Am I going to wait until my account gets hacked to backup Gmail? Or am I going to get my Gmail backup in advance?

Backupify’s Gmail insurance costs less than a latte at Starbucks. I know my multiple gigabytes of Gmail messages — and the irreplaceable correspondence therein — are worth more than a venti mocha. I bet anyone who has lost important data online  feels the same way. How much is your Gmail account worth, and how much would you pay for peace of mind? Think about it, then try Backupify for free.

Most people, however, overlook and equally important component of a backup solution: the restore process. What is that like? How does it work? Is it quick and easy? What if the data you are restoring already exists in the account?

At Backupify, we spent a lot of time fine-tuning the restore process to make it as fast as possible to get your data restored and get back to business. For example, we have a centralized user admin panel so you can restore data for multiple accounts without having to endure the slow tedious process of logging out and logging back in as each user.

We also put a lot of checks and balances in place to make sure our restores are non-destructive. If you try to restore something that already exists in Google Docs, Calendar or Contacts we simply upload an archive version alongside the original, with the latter sporting a “Backupify_restore” label. This allows you to quickly login to your original Google Apps account and find the piece of data you just tried to restore. Of course, if the data doesn’t exist in your account and you restore it, we do push the original back to your Google Apps account, and again add the “Backupify_restore” label to make it easy to find. (Gmail does not allow duplicate versions of the same message, but this also means we can’t restore a message that isn’t missing. Intact messages are “replaced” with exact duplicates, plus the “Backupify_restore” label. Corrupt versions are replaced with uncorrupt versions, plus the ”Backupify_restore” label.)

One thing to note is that, while we do offer backup and automated restore for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts, we only offer backup for Google Sites. The restore functionality that Google provides over their APIs isn’t adequate to restore Google Sites in an easy way, so for the time being, that restore process is still manual. We’d rather not do a direct Google Sites restore than do one badly. At Backupify, we don’t take shortcuts with your data.

Of course, you could also use our SnapShot tool to generate an immediate backup and download of your entire Google Apps account.

Many of you have requested this on-demand backup feature, particularly for Gmail backups. We went the extra mile, as the on-demand button applies to backups for Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Contacts, and Sites. Please check it out and send us feedback.

To enable Labs in your Gmail, all you need to do is: Login to you Gmail account > Click on the Settings link> Select Labs.  From there, you can enable or disable any of the lab features and save them by clicking the Save Changes button. That’s it and you’re all set. So, without further ado, here’s our top 6 Gmail lab features:

1. Undo Send:
Ok! Show of hands – How many of you have sent en email and then realized that you forgot to add people to the list or even better, wished that you never sent the email in the first place. If the answer is yes (which we already know it is), then Undo Send is the feature for you. Undo Send, as the name suggests, allows to you undo a sent email for a few seconds, so that you can cancel the email from getting it delivered to the intended/unintended recipients.

2. Canned Response
For those of you who end up writing the same email 10 times a day, Canned Response is Godsend. All you need to do is enable this feature and the next time you create one of those repeat messages, just save them to the Canned Response tab that appears next to the Add an Attachment link in you email editor. Once saved, you can
you can use the Canned Response tab to send messages without going through the trouble of creating them from scratch.

3. Quick Links
Need a break form making Labels?  Quick links adds a box to your Gmail’s sidebar and gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages or anything you need to help you keep a list of to-dos.

4. Multiple Inboxes 
If you’re thinking productivity, you better be thinking Multiple Inboxes. This amazing lab feature turns your regular inbox into a one-stop shop for everything you would want to see in one centralized place, be it your labels, starred messages, drafts  and more. The best part is that  you can customize the look of your main window by adding/removing different sections under the Settings option.

5. Google Calendar Gadget
This one is my personal favorite. I don’t know about you but I frequently have to switch between my mailbox and calendar window to see my appointments/events for the day, which after a point does get a bit annoying. If you’re on the same boat as me, this gadget is what you need. Google Calendar Gadget adds a small box to your sidebar (similar to the Quick Links box) which shows your Google Calendar with a list of upcoming events, locations, and details. The little joy I get in not having to constantly switch between these windows is what makes this feature the number five on the list.

6. Message Sneak Peak
The last but equally useful feature on my list – Message Sneak Peak gives us nice little peek into a conversation without having you open an email. All you need to do is right click on a message in your inbox to see information in the email. This feature is perfect for people who get a lot of emails a day and just want to get a quick snapshot of the message without actually opening the email.

So that was our list of the top 6 Gmail Labs features to help you get more out of your Gmail account. Do you have any favorite lab features that we did not include in our list? And just as important, are you backing up your Gmail to prevent against the unforeseen case of an accidental deletion of an email or temporary unavailability of Gmail? We would love to hear your thoughts as usual.

If it is time to upgrade your Exchange server, you are probably struggling with the same issue as so many other I.T. departments – do you move your email to the cloud? You have heard the arguments that the cloud saves you money, and the counterarguments that it really doesn’t. You have read a thousand different analyses of Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. an Exchange upgrade. And you still haven’t made a decision. Don’t worry. We are here to help.

The Backupify research team has put together what we consider the five best guides to Google Apps vs. Office 365, so you can make an educated decision about which platform is best for your company, or if you should skip the cloud altogether and stay on-premise.

1. Google Apps vs. Office365: Your Choice from ZDNet. This post by Revevol founder Louis Nages does a great job of digging into the core architectural issues that I.T. departments may be concerned about.

2. This ReadWriteWeb article considers Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. Zoho, and we chose it because it tries to normalize the three across the standard user dimensions any I.T. department would use to evaluate the platforms.

3. In Google Apps vs. Office 365: It All Depends, an Interop panel analyzes both suites and provides some thoughts.

4. In Which Should You Use, Lifehacker looks at both apps from a user’s point of view.

5. And finally, we save the best for last. In Google Apps vs. Office365: Top 10 Enterprise Concerns, InformationWeek takes a point by point in-depth view of the issues a large enterprise will face when making this decision. This is one of the more detailed investigations of both applications.

Both Google and Microsoft have aggressive roadmaps, and migrating between the two applications is no easy task. So it is important that you make the right decision for your company and stick with it for the next few years. We hope these guides can help.

Related articles

• The 9 Must-Read Blogs for Cloud-Based Businesses (backupify.com)

Apparently this behavior is somewhat common, as users who like clean inboxes use trash as storage instead of creating unique folders. Of course, when this company migrated from Exchange to Google Apps, the trash folder for these users was migrated to the trash folder in Gmail, which flushes data after 30 days. Now those users had lost important emails. Luckily, they used Backupify and, after spending a few minutes with us on the phone, were able to find and restore those messages back to Gmail.

When we first built our restore functionality, we didn’t realize it would really be used so often. We didn’t put a lot of time into the UI design and user experience, and that turned out to be a mistake. Over the last year, as we have come to realize how often people do make mistakes and need to find and restore data, so we have invested a lot of time and effort into making that process as quick and easy as possible.

There are lots of Gmail backup tools on the market, but the speed and ease with which you can restore data from Backupify back to Gmail sets us apart. Any tool can get your data back, but time is money and, in that sense, Backupify provides great ROI. Some backup tools that only run locally make you re-upload messages to Gmail from your PC. Some tools require you, as an administrator, to login multiple times as multiple users because they lack a central administration interface, and require you to spend time navigating file structures to find the data you need.

With Backupify, the restore process is this simple:
1. Login – We allow administrators to see data for all users from a centralized interface
2. Search for what you are looking for – Backupify is the only Gmail backup product on the market that offers search
3. Click on that item – Pull up a list of options for your Archive data, including restore and download
4. Click on the restore option - Instantly push it back to Google Apps, or download to restore it locally

Restoring data with Backupify takes just a few seconds and is very affordable. Think of it this way – it costs just $36/year to backup a single user. If you take into account the average cost of an employee and the time it would take to either search for missing data or contact a SaaS provider to restore it (estimated time: 45 minutes), Backupify has already paid for itself. In other words, speed makes a big impact in productivity. If speed matters to you, try Backupify for free.

As a result, many I.T. teams straddle the cloud world by moving to the cloud for all its benefits, but maintaining a local copy of important data. I know this because more than half of the customers who have used Backupify to backup their Gmail have, at some point, used our local download option to get a local copy of their Google Apps data for an account. In addition, our SnapShot tool has been used by over 800 companies to create a local archive of Gmail for departing employees.

Most people think if you are going cloud, you should go all in. But that doesn’t really make sense. Data and applications are two very different things, and while moving your applications to the cloud might be a great idea, moving your data to the cloud is a bit riskier. Of course, if you create a separate copy of that data in another cloud, then you have effectively hedged your risks without storing data locally, but there is something about local storage that makes people feel good.

So what you should do? Should you backup your Gmail to another cloud, or should you download your Gmail data locally?

There are some great tools like gmail-backup.com that run locally and perform backups of your Google mail to your local hard drive. And of course there are great tools like Backupify that store your Gmail backups on servers in the cloud. How do you decide which is best for you? Here are four key factors you should think about when making the cloud vs. local decision:

1. Automation – One advantage of using a SaaS application like Backupify is that we backup your Gmail automatically, regardless of whether your PC is on or off.

2. User Management – For large accounts, managing individual backups and downloads can be tough. Backupify simplifies user management by providing the only tool on the market with a consolidated account view. With a single login, you can see the status of all the backups on your domain at a glance, and address notifications that we generate when a backup doesn’t work due to API issues, invalid user credentials, etc.

3. Price – Let’s face it, there is always a price to be paid for simplicity and automation. Tools that run in the cloud are usually more expensive than tools that run locally.

4. Data location – Sometimes you just feel better when your data is local. Most cloud backup tools leave your data in the cloud, and most desktop backup solutions keep your data local. Backupify is unique in that you can have a cloud-based backup of your Gmail, but also can download a zip of that backup at any time.

It might seem counterintuitive to run your apps in the cloud but then ask for a local copy of your data, but if that is what you want, you aren’t alone. Controlling your mission-critical business data matters, and the more copies you have, the more you mitigate your risks of data loss. So if you need a gmail backup tool for your business, and are debating whether or not to store the backup locally or in the cloud, consider Backupify for Google Apps, and you can have the best of both worlds.

You read that right: The company that makes its living backing up Google Apps data (among other things) just copped to Google never losing Google Apps data.

Zero. Bupkus. Nada. None.

So what is Backupify still doing here, right? We said Google has never lost Google Apps data (so far as we’ve found). Plenty of Google Apps data has gone missing. And it’s Google Apps users that are responsible for the bulk of the losing. Our research shows that the #1 reason for data loss within Google Apps is user error – as in 63% of the losses.

Below we’ve developed a nice, shiny infographic that lays out how data is lost in Google Apps – and how you can prevent said losses from happening. (Hint: Stop writing your Google Apps password on a Post-It note taped to your monitor.) The infographic is based on our own Google Apps Data Loss report, which we developed by auditing a random sample of quality posts from the Google Apps Help Forums.

For those of you forwarding this graphic and/or whitepaper to your boss, here’s the marketing-speak to use:

“This report identifies the leading causes of Google Apps data loss (all incidents of data loss were found to be beyond Google’s control) and the tools and policies available to bring peace of mind to Google Apps deployments.”

Summary:

• 89% of Google Apps data access issues were related to data loss (Oh crap, it’s gone!). Only 11% were related to data availability (Oh crap, it’s down!).
• Exactly 0% of all data access issues were Google’s fault.
• User error causes 63% of all Google Apps data loss problems – by far the most common cause.
• Hacked accounts represented a mere 8% of all data loss cases.

Click here to view a larger version of this infographic: