Backupify » Backup

Introducing The Best Way To Restore Google Drive Files – The GDrive Deleted Items List

Rob May — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:55:10 +0000

One of the constant internal debates we have at Backupify is about how to make restoring data to Google Apps as fast and easy as possible. There are two primary ways to find a deleted item to restore: search, and browse. If you remember the name of the document, but not where it was located, then search is the most useful. If you remember where the document was located, but don’t remember the name, then browsing is the most useful.

The default in Backupify has always been search because our user behavior surveys show that people are more likely to remember some part of the document metadata, such as the name, than they are to remember where it was located. But today we are excited to announce a third way to find deleted data that is even better than searching or browsing – the Deleted Items list.

Two Backupify-ers, Ben Povlich from engineering and Ryan Harnedy from sales, came up with this idea at one of our internal hackathons, and we thought it was such a useful feature that we decided to polish it up and push it to customers as quickly as possible. If you have an Enterprise account and you login to your Backupify account today, you will see deleted items on your Google Drive backups page, and soon it will be rolled out to all accounts, regardless of plan. So, how does it work?

Backupify monitors Google Drive for each domain user that you have set up, and when something is deleted from Gdrive, we add it to the Deleted Items list when we next back you up. When you login, the list you see is the most recently deleted items which, more than likely, contains the item you want to restore. You can restore it from the backup to Google Drive with a simple click right from the Deleted Items list. No more searching, no more browsing, we serve the deleted item straight to you with no fuss.

What is so interesting about this feature is that it provides a new, innovative way to find the data you are most likely to restore, without relying on searching or browsing. It saves you time; which is the one thing we all need more of.

We are adding new functionality to Backupify all the time, and this feature is a great example of how we are always thinking about how to make your life even easier. So login and try it out. Let us know what you think via email or in the comments section.

And if you came to this post via a search for restoring data back to Google Drive, you should know that 32% of all companies on SaaS have lost data in a SaaS application. Don’t be one of them. Backup your Google Drive today with Backupify.

Suffering from a Google Apps Disruption? 5 Instances for Backup

Tania Pylyp — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:08:46 +0000

Since earlier this morning, there have been some outage issues with Google Apps. While Google is normally very reliable, this is a clear instance that shows they are not entirely perfect. And while we are confident that in the long-run, we will get our data back, right now we can’t access any of our Gmail, Google drive, Google docs, calendar, contacts, or sites.

How might this be affecting you? Here are five scenarios where accessing your information NOW is necessary. In an instance where Google is down, the only way you could do so is through a service like Backupify.

You have a meeting later today with a potential investor, but can’t access your pitch presentation in Google docs.
You’re standing at the airport trying to remember which airline you are flying and can’t access your confirmation email.
You think you are supposed to meet a customer today, can’t remember when, but can’t check your calendar.
Your co-worker needs the phone # of a new client, but you can’t access your contacts to find it.
Your CEO sent you an important report and asked you to download and print it for the morning meeting.

Backup your data now, so that even if you don’t lose it forever, you can access it anytime.

Will Malaysia Back Up its Google Apps?

Tania Pylyp — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:25:07 +0000

Yesterday, it was announced that Malaysia will adopt Google Apps for Education for over 10 million students, teachers, and parents throughout the country. They have followed in the footsteps of the Philippines who uses Google Apps to connect 45,000 schools, 200 divisions, and 600,000 staff across more than 7,000 islands. We were thrilled to find this out as the expansion of people using the cloud means our ability to help protect their data has grown as well. So the big question in our head is – will the government of Malaysia back up its Google Apps data?

The problems around not backing up data are slightly different in education than they are outside of it. Although user error remains the biggest culprit of data loss, there are particular instances specific to the education world that should be considered. For instance, if a student is studying for an exam, but she can’t find her last few weeks of notes. Or if a teacher is preparing for tomorrow’s class but misplaced his lesson plan. We have even heard a story where a student wasn’t going to meet his deadline for an important paper. He then purposefully deleted his Google doc and claimed to the teacher that “Google ate his homework”. All these types of instances specific to Education raise the need for cloud backup even higher.

The solutions, luckily, are the same: having a reliable automated daily backup like Backupify to ensure instances, however seemingly silly, do not disrupt the natural flow of classroom learning. So, we encourage the Malaysian government to back up its data, as that’s an entire country’s worth of educational information that it can otherwise lose.

New Features and Functionality are Abloom with our Spring Release for Backupify for Google Apps

Kara Sweeney — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:03:25 +0000

We are excited to announce our Backupify for Google Apps Spring Release (even though our local Boston weather refuses to accommodate our theme). This release is blooming with updates across all plans (Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise +) with increased restore & export functionality, enhanced security and unlimited storage.

This release is timely, as articles about the risks of moving data to the cloud and using BYOD highlight the need for a backup strategy. In addition, Symantec’s report entitled “Avoiding the Hidden Costs of the Cloud”, confirms these risks finding in their survey of 3,000+ companies that over 40% of businesses using SaaS have experienced data loss.

Backupify’s Spring Release focuses on the needs of large organizations, with new features including:

Full Domain Export allows administrators to download a full copy of their domain data, for a nominal fee. Whether responding to eDiscovery requests or satisfying internal requirements with an on-premise copy, the full domain export is a simple way to have your entire domain exported in a consumable format.
Configurable Data Retention provides administrators with the ability to set a customized email retention period. This feature allows customers to respond to specific legal retention requirements or internal archiving policies.
Batch Import of Users gives administrators the flexibility to upload groups of users they want backed up – for example: by Organizational Unit (OU). This feature makes is easy to deploy Backupify for Google Apps across large organizations, and simplifies ongoing user management.
Restore and Export Folder Hierarchy allows users to keep their organizational structure intact when restoring or exporting an entire account.
Google Sites Restore gives both end-users and administrators the ability to restore items back to their Google Sites accounts quickly and easily.
Unlimited Storage on all per-user accounts enables our customers to scale their protection as the data in their Google Apps accounts grow. We also created FreeSpace to help manage Gmail inboxes as they reach google’s strict 25GB storage limit.
SSAE/SOC2 Type I audit certifies that Backupify adheres to the AICPA Service Organization Control Trust Services Principles, Criteria, and Illustrations for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. This audit report provides all of our customers the peace of mind that Backupify is always striving for the highest standards in security.

Our Spring Release emphasizes Backupify’s commitment to building the leading Enterprise SaaS backup as measured by security, reliability and functionality. As always, we welcome feedback from our customers to identify what should be in our next release.

6 Ways to Live Dangerously

Tania Pylyp — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:30:35 +0000

Not Backing Up Your Data is Like:

Driving 80 mph on The Death Road in Bolivia.
Diving in Australia’s Shaft Sinkhole without an oxygen tank.
Putting all your money on the craps table in Vegas.
Sky diving in Switzerland without a parachute.
Performing in a trapeze show without a net.
Running with the bulls in Pamplona. Or anywhere.

Want to live dangerously? Fine. We just gave you a bunch of things to add to your bucket list. But we’ll be here in case you actually live through it…and want to protect your data.

The 5 (but really the 6) Mistakes Made in Big Data

Tania Pylyp — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:00:05 +0000

Last week, we wrote about the assumed relationship between Big Data and innovation, and highlighted that there is an important analytical step necessary to move from the former to the latter.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a similar insight, that “companies are finding that big data doesn’t necessarily translate into easy success”. They put out a list of 5 mistakes enterprises make with big data and how to avoid them. They are:

Data for Data’s Sake: where companies try to follow the trend of Big Data without first considering the larger goal and objectives.
Talent Gap: the shortage of employees with data analysis skills
Data, Data Everywhere: the failure to properly organize large sums of data
Infighting: internal disputes over which department or who owns the data
Aiming Too High: the paralysis that results from taking on too large of initiatives

We generally agree that these are mistakes that companies can easily make. But the Wall Street Journal failed to consider one other very important mistake that companies find out about only after it’s too late. And that is what we think should be the 6th mistake in the list: the frequent failure to back up data.

As a backup service for cloud-based apps like Google Apps and Salesforce, we certainly care about the larger topics of data security, data integrity, and securing information. And with the trend towards Big Data, we’re eager to initiate the conversation about the importance of securing all data (big and small) and backing it up to prevent losing information.

So what do you think? Should companies beginning Big Data initiatives use their current backup systems to protect their information? Do you know of any available solutions that can mitigate the risk of data loss? Let us know in the comments below.

Data Loss is #2 Security Threat to Cloud Data

Tania Pylyp — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:52:19 +0000

Late last month, the Cloud Security Alliance identified the following as the Top 9 Cloud Security Threats in 2013.

Data Breaches
Data Loss
Account or Service Traffic Hijacking
Insecure Interfaces & APIs
Denial of Service
Malicious Insiders
Abuse of Cloud Services
Insufficient Due Diligence
Shared Technology Vulnerabilities

If you don’t want to read the full PDF, Cloudtimes has a summary of the 2013 cloud security report.

Interestingly, the second most severe threat to cloud security is Loss of Data. And since 2010, it has moved up in the CSA’s rankings from the fifth most severe to the second most severe threat.

This is not surprising considering Symantec’s poll in January where 43% of the 3,200 organizations they surveyed lost data in the cloud and needed to recover it from backups. That is almost half of companies who benefited or could have benefited from having a backup of their data in the cloud.

Whether its a malicious attacker, an accidental deletion, or a physical catastrophe that causes it, permanent data loss is a risk that every company faces — and it poses some serious implications. Aside from the obvious loss of productivity and the wasted time trying to recreate lost information, businesses should also consider how loss of data can jeopardize the status of a company’s regulatory compliance.

Since the risk of data loss has increased in significance and severity across the board, we’d like to remind you that it does not have to be a risk for your company, and that you can mitigate the risk of data loss with a secure, automated, daily backup of your cloud-based information – with Backupify. Doing business in the cloud can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be so. Learn more about our research on data loss or take a free trial of Backupify now.

The Most Common Cloud Computing Fears, and How to Fix Them

Tania Pylyp — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:43:16 +0000

When we hear that our customers have concerns about the cloud, our ears immediately perk up. Because hurdles you face on cloud-based apps are opportunities for us to help you overcome. And while we can’t address all of your challenges, we are proud to say that we can help with some of the most important ones.

Here are some concerns we’ve recently heard about, and ways we can help out.

1) “I can’t restore docs & folders when users permanently deletes them”

BetterCloud surveyed 18,361 Google Apps administrators and found that between 30 percent and over 50 percent of organizations were concerned about restoring Google Apps documents that users deleted.

2) Data Integrity – Ensuring Data Remains Available & True

The CTTA State of the Cloud Channel 2013 study, a joint project of The 2112 Group and Channel Partners magazine, ranked the top 10 concerns that solution providers encounter in cloud sales, and #4 was Data Integrity. Organizations are concerned about data becoming corrupted in the cloud and they worry about the inability for cloud providers to effectively recover their data.

3) Security – Ensuring Information is Safe

This same list ranks Security as the #1 Concern of organizations. The fear of susceptibility to malware, hackers, and cyber-espionage is the #1 reason why companies are objecting to moving to the cloud in the first place.

How Backupify Relieves These Concerns

These three scenarios represent completely valid fears. Losing data is certainly scary, and hackers do exist. Whether it is your users’ fault or an external party’s fault, cloud data can be corrupted or deleted, which is the last thing you want to happen. Fortunately, in each of these three cases, we can help.

Backupify’s core use case is recovering lost data on Google Apps, Salesforce, and other cloud-based apps. Our cloud-to-cloud backup service automatically creates a second copy of all your cloud data every day and allows you to restore any or all of either to your hard drive or directly back to your cloud-based app. So whether your users, the cloud provider itself, or a hacker corrupted or deleted something permanently from your account, you will have what you want when you need it. You can learn about all of Backupify’s cloud backup products here.

Customize Your Google Apps Backup to Match Your Business Needs

Kara Sweeney — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:55:40 +0000

Our customers range from a company making health drinks to a radio station to entire school districts, and just as the business needs of these organizations are different, so are their backup requirements. Backupify allows companies of all sizes and industries to deploy a Google Apps backup solution that meets their unique needs. Here are a few examples of Backupify’s customization:

Pick who to backup on your Google Apps domain:

A large university chose to only backup their faculty and administration
A large company chose only to backup the knowledge workers in their organization and not the manufacturing and temporary employees
Most customers choose to back up all their domains, and all their users, to make sure that everyone is protected and information can be retrieved no matter what occurs

Pick which services you want to backup:

A large company was only using Google Apps for Drive; therefore they selected to only backup that service
A medium-sized company in a regulated industry using Postini (Vault) for email archiving chose to backup all other services (Drive, Contacts, Calendar and Sites)
A K-5 school choose to only backup their student email and chats to help address litigation concerns around cyber-bullying
Most customers choose to back up all their services to make sure all data is saved, however the flexibility to turn off services across your domain is a great option for some of our customers

Set your data retention policy:

A school district maintains all administrative records for 7-years to comply with regulatory requirements
A school backing up all their student email wanted to only retain the information for one year to minimize storage overhead
A large company purges their email backups every 3 months

Backupify allows you to tailor your backup to suit your needs. Talk to your sales rep about how Backupify can be customized to match your specific backup and archiving needs.

How Cloud to Cloud Backup Prevents Cloud Lock-In

Rob May — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:58:45 +0000

Barb Darrow writes today in GigaOm about fear of lock-in as a barrier to cloud adoption.

It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold – but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

While she may not realize it just yet, the solution to this problem is emerging via an unlikely industry – the backup industry.

In the on-premise backup world, which is where most of IT still lives, data backup was just data backup. But as data moves to the cloud, that dynamic changes. Why? Because in the cloud, you don’t always have complete control of your data the way that you do in on-premise application deployments. Replicated data from a cloud-to-cloud backup product like Backupify isn’t just a backup – it’s a secure second copy of your data that is under your control, and that has more advantages than just data recovery.

Take an example and consider a company moving to Google Apps. All that application data is now stored in the cloud and, while Google has very friendly policies around data ownership, many IT administrators don’t feel like they have complete control. Now, assume you have Backupify’s Google Apps backup installed. You now have a secure second copy of your data that is in a separate location, under your control. You can’t be locked-in to Google when you have another copy of your data that is independent of Google Apps.

When we announced our Backupify developer API earlier this year, we weren’t just responding to the need for backup. We were responding to the need for data control. As we start rolling out integrations with dozens of SaaS applications, there will soon come a day when, for every SaaS application you have, you can sleep well knowing you have a secure second copy of that data under your control at Backupify. When you control all of your data, you can move to the cloud with confidence.

The cloud offers many benefits, but they come with a set of costs as well. The data silos that result are difficult to tie together, and the data isn’t always under your control. Backupify has a roadmap to help solve those problems. Cloud-to-cloud backup is really so much more than just backup – it is just a stepping stone to a vision of complete ownership and control of your cloud data.

Data Loss in SaaS: The Problem You Didn’t Know You Had

Rob May — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:42:52 +0000

Can you lose data in Google Apps, Salesforce, and other SaaS applications? Absolutely. We previously posted a very interesting video by Salesforce about why you should backup your Salesforce data, and now on the heels of that, Aberdeen has released an interesting report about SaaS data loss. As you can see from the chart below, 32 percent of companies have lost data in a SaaS application. If that number makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry, Backupify offers a backup for Google Apps, a backup for Salesforce, and will offer backup for many more SaaS apps this year. And if you want to read the original research report, you can currently download it for free at Aberdeen’s website.

New Feature: Restoring Google Sites Data with Backupify

Emily Glass — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:51:31 +0000

While some of you have been passionate Google Sites users for a long time, others are just starting to explore the concept of using Google Sites. Over the last year, we’ve definitely seen a few customers with heavy Google Sites usage for internal wikis and projects. In order to show them some love for Valentine’s day (technically we launched this feature yesterday afternoon) we present restore for Google Sites!

All of our customers, in both Professional and Enterprise plans, can now take advantage of this restore functionality. Simply sign into your Backupify account, navigate to your Google Sites archive and then find a page or attachment you’d like to restore. Click the handy ‘Restore’ button for the item you wish to restore – and voila! Your page or attachment will be returned to the site from whence it came. You can, as always, still choose to download the asset immediately, instead of restoring it, if you wish.

Keep up with our product updates in the Backupify Support center. Also, stay tuned for news about our World Backup Day (3.31.2013) product release.

The Two (Bad) Reasons Why Users Don’t Back Up Their SaaS Data

Jay Garmon — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:51:06 +0000

So here’s a strange behavioral paradox: Almost everyone understands the need to backup the data on their computers, but almost no one seems to think they should backup their data in the cloud. There are two very common reasons why backup best practices aren’t observed with SaaS applications — and both of them are dangerously wrong.

1) “Doesn’t the cloud backup my data?”
Users and organizations typically move from on-premises applications to software-as-a-service apps to get out of the hardware and software management business — including the management of backup systems. In the old on-premise days, the leading cause of data loss was hardware failure. A good, old-fashion hard drive crash was once an IT pro’s greatest fear — accounting for 44 percent of all data losses. Moving to the cloud absolutely ameliorates this concern, as every major cloud provider has multiple redundant hardware systems that make hardware failure almost irrelevant. To lose data, every device replicating your data (and there are many, in many places) would need to fail.

That’s great, but what about the other 56 percent of the data loss equation? User error, a rogue employee (yours or the SaaS provider’s), a skilled hacker, a software glitch or even a natural disaster could still wipe out your SaaS data. Cloud providers are naturally reticent to talk about this possibility. User error accounted for a mere 32 percent of data losses in on-premises systems, but accounts for 63 percent of data loss in Google Apps. As these systems become easier to access, it becomes easier for users to screw them up, too.

Cloud providers can’t protect you from self-inflicted data loss; SaaS applications can’t distinguish between intentional and mistaken commands, or between benevolent and malicious users. Backing up your cloud data is the only way to ensure that your information is safe from both hardware failure and human error.

2) “It’s more trouble than it’s worth!”
Many IT professionals know that independent data backup is a good idea, even in the cloud — they just don’t have the time or the patience to perform backups on a regular basis. As mentioned above, the common misconception that “cloud” means “you don’t need backup” leads even seasoned IT admins to de-prioritize making backup a central feature of their SaaS applications.

Salesforce, for example, offers weekly or monthly exports, but they are more than a little cumbersome. Google has a number of export options through Google Takeout, but none of these one-off, manual solutions matches the purpose-built efficiency of on-premise backup systems. They either require explicit oversight and initiation from the administrator, or they simply aren’t frequent enough to mitigate serious business risk.

Since most users aren’t asking for automated export or backup, these SaaS providers have no reason to concentrate on improving these features. That puts the onus on SaaS administrators to muddle through manual, barebones data backup — which is exactly the sort of work moving to the cloud was supposed to eliminate.

These two reasons are why Backupify exists. We offer independent, automatic, daily backup for Google Apps, Salesforce and virtually any other mature SaaS application. Backupify covers the use cases the cloud’s hardware redundancy doesn’t, and makes backup as simple as you always hoped SaaS could be. Give it a try today.

Set a Custom Gmail Retention Period with Backupify’s New Configurable Data Retention

Emily Glass — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:30:59 +0000

Today we launched a new feature for our Google Apps Enterprise customers: configurable data retention. Enterprise customers can now set their own Gmail backup retention period for Backupify users on their Google Apps domain.

This customization allows organizations to tailor Backupify to suit their business and legal requirements. Customers choose Backupify because it allows the company to have final control over their Google Apps and Salesforce data. That control now extends to your email retention policy and frees our enterprise customers from Google’s compulsory retention parameters, which permanently deletes emails when the Trash folder is emptied. With configurable data retention, you can control when email data is saved and when it is deleted from your Gmail archive. We have some customers that like to purge all emails from their system after 90-days while others must retain email correspondence for up to seven years for legal compliance, and our solution can serve them both.

Your Gmail retention period is flexible, and can be set to any length desired. Please Contact Backupify Support if you want to customize your Gmail retention period (Backupify’s default setting is to never purge the data). Not an enterprise customer? Contact Backupify Sales to upgrade your account.

Why Those Who Most Need Salesforce Backup Do It The Least

Jay Garmon — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:44:47 +0000

The more data you have in Salesforce, the more you need a Salesforce backup. The more data you have in Salesforce, the longer it takes to export your Salesforce information, and the more likely it is that a Salesforce administrator will mishandle a manual Salesforce backup.

In other words, the companies with the most to lose from a Salesforce data failure are the ones most likely to neglect their manual Salesforce backups. That’s like the most expensive house on your block having the least homeowner’s insurance.

Here’s how manual Salesforce exports work: Administrators can schedule weekly or monthly exports to kick off automatically, and can specify what data types are included in those exports. When the scheduled kickoff occurs, Salesforce will begin preparing the export. This is key.

Salesforce doesn’t let you schedule when a manual export is ready, it lets you schedule when a manual export will begin. While most exports are ready within 48 hours, larger jobs have been known to take as much as a week. If you’re running weekly Salesforce exports, it’s entirely possible (though unlikely) that a new export job will kickoff before the last one is complete.

The time it takes to build your regular manual Salesforce export will depend entirely on how much data you’re exporting and how much processing overhead Salesforce is consuming for other processes. Bottom line: your Salesforce administrator has no way of knowing exactly when a manual export will be ready for download.

Salesforce alerts admins of a completed export with an automatic email. Once that email is sent, Salesforce begins a 48-hour countdown, after which the downloadable .zip file is deleted. That’s a reasonable security precaution (and good data hygiene), but if your admin misses the alert email — and remember, she has no way of knowing when the job will complete or when to expect the alert email — it’s entirely possible the export link will expire before she can download your Salesforce data.

As such, companies with huge Salesforce data footprint have to have an admin on standby to ensure that whenever a manual export is ready, the data gets downloaded. Thus, it’s no surprise that Salesforce administrators, with plenty of other immediate tasks to deal with, don’t perform as many manual exports as they probably should — and that situation gets work for the largest Salesforce systems, as those admins are the busiest and those backups are the most time-consuming.

That’s why a fully automated, third-party Salesforce backup makes sense. Not because Salesforce doesn’t offer perfectly serviceable export functionality itself, but because your admins have better things to do than babysit their inboxes waiting for download alert emails that could come at any time.

Don’t waste your Salesforce admins’ time. Backup Salesforce automatically, every day.

Backupify » Backup

Introducing The Best Way To Restore Google Drive Files – The GDrive Deleted Items List

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