Users in your business want to have constant access to their files no matter what device they are using or wherever they go. The days of your users toting around thumb drives or other media to carry their files with them are over. Google Drive is an extremely popular option for your users to store their files in the cloud.
As an IT admin for your business, protecting users data is extremely important. Even when data is stored in the cloud, you need to back it up. What can lead to end-users losing their data in Google Drive? What are the best backup tools for Google Drive? Lets take a look at both third-party and built-in backup tools for Google Drive.
How Can You Lose Data on Google Drive?
There are a number of ways that data may be lost in Google Drive. The reasons can include
- Accidentally deleting data
- Unintentionally overwriting data
- Ransomware
Why would you accidentally delete your own data? Actually, over 50% of data loss issues are the result of end-user mistakes. Accidental deletion can happen in a number of ways. Simply clicking on the wrong file and deleting it when you think it is another file is one very common way that files may get deleted in Google Drive.
Unintentionally overwriting data ties in with accidentally deleting data. When you accidentally overwrite a file with a new file or perform a Save operation instead of Save As, you may be overwriting and accidentally deleting data all in one operation.
Ransomware is scary. It can encrypt files with an encryption key that basically places a lock on them. The bad guys then make you pay a ransom for the key to be handed over to you.
How can ransomware infect your Google Drive files?
With Googles Backup & Sync tool, when you change a local Google Drive file on a local computer, it is synchronized to the Google Drive cloud. If ransomware infects your local computer, most likely your local copies of Google Drive files will be encrypted. Once encrypted, Backup & Sync will synchronize your files to the Google Drive cloud which means both copies of your data are locked by ransomware.
Spinbackup The Best Backup Tool for Google Drive
When looking for an end to end solution to protect your users Google Drive data, Spinbackup provides all the right features that allow you to protect business data and secure it from the threats that can cause data loss in the first place, like ransomware.
It provides a unique backup solution that is built around a full-blown cybersecurity solution for your Google G Suite environment. What features do you get with Spinbackup protecting your organizations Google Drive resources?
- Automated 1-3X daily backups of Google Drive and other G Suite services
- Configurable retention
- Select which data you want to backup
- Powerful versioning for all your Google Drive data resources
- Ability to store your data in different public cloud storage
- Encrypted backups in-flight and at-rest
- Ability to migrate data between your G Suite users
- Easily search through your backups for specific items you want to recover
- Activity reports detailing the status of your protected files across your organization
- Download data from backups captured by Spinbackup to your device
On top of being the best backup tool for Google Drive, Spinbackup provides a top-notch cybersecurity solution for G Suite. This helps to prevent many of the security risks to your Google Drive data that would require restoring backups. This includes:
- Ransomware protection proactively monitors and stops ransomware infections in G Suite
- Monitor for insider threats
- Failed login monitoring
- Sensitive Data leaks or downloads
- Risky third-party app protection including blacklisting and whitelisting apps
- Daily security report for monitoring
- Real-time alerting
- Domain and Data dashboards give centralized visibility to security threats
Spinbackup provides a fully-featured backup and cybersecurity solution for Google Drive
If you want the best backup tool for Google Drive and a cybersecurity solution to go along with it, Spinbackup provides the total solution to ensure your data is safe in Google Drive.
Other Third-Party and Native Google Drive Backup Tools
There are many other third-party tools available for backing up your Google Drive data. However, these not as powerful and fully featured as Spinbackup. Other tools such as Backupify and Spanning both provide third-party backups of your Google Drive data.
Both products can provide basic backups of Google Drive but have no built-in cybersecurity features as does Spinbackup. Additionally, Spinbackup provides the best options for configuring backup frequency, retention, as well as the only vendor to support storing backups of Google Drive data in different cloud storage.
In addition to third-party tools, there are some limited native capabilities contained in Google Drive that can be leveraged for very light duty restores of data. These include the Undo operation for files deleted from Google Drive and the Manage Versions capability to restore a specific file version.
The Google Drive Undooperation allows you to basically perform an un-delete on a file that you deleted. If you mistakenly delete a file in Google Drive, you can quickly restore the file to its original location in Google Drive. There are limitations to this, however, as deleted files are only kept for around 28 days or so.
Undoing a delete in Google Drive
The Manage Versioncapability allows you to roll back to a specific version of a file. The scenario where you perform a Save operation instead of Save As can easily be rolled back by making use of the manage versions functionality. This allows downloading the version of the file of your choosing which you can use to restore the file back to its previous state. Again, you are limited to around a months worth of file versions which is a limitation.
Downloading a different version of a file in Google Drive
The light backups of your data found in these two features are very limited. If you want to properly protect critical business data found in Google Drive, using a third-party solution is much more effective.
Spinbackup is the best backup tool for Google Drive containing the most fully-featured offering that includes both backup functionality and cybersecurity features to protect your Google Drive data. Check out the G Suite backup features of Spinbackup here.
Image credit: Backup via Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock