Why don't people make backups anymore? I know that using Google Apps is much easier than running your own stuff in-house. It requires much less time and resources, but at the same time there are still best practices and disaster recovery plans that should always have something about backups in them. And just having them isn't good enough. They also need to be followed. Having worked at a place without these ( and attempting to get them implemented ) versus where I currently work that has them and follows them, I have to say, there are a lot fewer times where I feel like screaming here. Do it, and stop expecting 100% uptime and availability of all docs/important information from any service, internal or external. Nothing is 100% but there are many ways to make it less stressful.
100% agree.
We are developing service which tries to solve some of these problems, so I'll do a shameless plug here.
One way to address these kind of problems is to use cloudHQ to synchronize your Google Docs with SugarSync (clickable: http://cloudHQ.net/sugarsync). (We are releasing dropbox this weekend).
Here is our idea: there are many different cloud storage services and each of them is very good for a particular use case but not so good for other use cases. For example, Google Docs service is excellent for collaboration but not so good for storage. On the other hand, Dropbox or Sugarsync service is excellent for storage but not so for collaboration.
So if data is continuously synchronized between Google Docs and lets say SugarSync storage, then you can always fall back to SugarSync when Google Docs becomes unavailable and vice versa. In order words, you can use other service as a standby site in case of service unavailability, malicious or accidental deletion of files, etc.
One of the system admins here made a comment about how important backups are for a business. He said the only time he ever saw someone get fired immediately was when they screwed up the backup system.
He talked me through all the design considerations they had to do for their backup system for the datacenter here. It's a lot of work, but there is a lot of business value in having a working backup system.
That's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops..
But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.
Actually, since SugarSync inaugurated the shameless plug portion of the thread, let it be said that Google Apps is hard to manually backup. That why we automated it at Backupify. http://www.backupify.com
Automatic daily Google Apps backups -- all of it, even Google Sites -- for just $3 per user per month. Unlimited storage. One-click restore for Google Docs and Gmail messages. And we're soon rolling out full-domain search, so you can query all your Gmail, Docs and Calendar accounts simultaneously.
We also backup your Twitter Feed, your Facebook Pages and your Flickr or Picasa photo albums, should the need arise.
Also, for the record, we have a 1-800 number that we actually answer, so in the event you have trouble with our service, we'll pick up the phone and talk you through the fix. We can't repair your Apps account, but we can darn well make sure you get to the data that's in it. We wouldn't charge you, otherwise.
Do you have any integration (or plans for integration) with Dropbox? I'd love to sign up to a service that simply dumps a copy of all my backed up files to a Dropbox folder somewhere, once a week.
That's on our roadmap, yes. In the future we'll be storage-agnostic, so you can use our S3 storage, your own S3 storage, Box.net, Dropbox, and a few other options we're mulling over.
The $4.99 per month plan, Backupify Pro 100, allows for 5 users on an Apps domain and 20GB of storage. That plan is geared towards small mom & pop operations, not the bigdog system e1ven was running.
Our Pro 500 plan is $19.99 per month and includes 10 Google Apps users and unlimited storage. That actually breaks down to less than $2 per user per month. Beyond that first ten, additional users are $3 per user per month. I usually just quote the $3 figure for simplicity's sake, especially since most admins using a paid Google Apps domain (Google Apps Premium) have more than 10 users anyway.
Aren't the Google Docs GDATA enabled? [1] If so then it should be pretty straightforward to write a script which would pull down copies of any file that had changed for local backup.
I understood that, he's going through the 'standard' Google escalation process for paying customers. Someone from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in the docs group is no doubt working on a ticket to track down broken GFS cell or maybe a PCR (that was code for changes that might take out a whole cluster or data center for periods of time). Its probably one of a few dozen they are looking at and given the layering the actual fix could take a couple of days to take hold, especially if the data in question is actually only available on tape at this point.
But he's an operations guy like me, and he probably wears both a belt and suspenders just in case the belt breaks. So in response to the complaint that emailing yourself files to insure you have copies is a pain, I suggested he script the moral equivalent using Google's provided APIs to the docs service.
How do you backup Google Documents? Can any of the popular backup utilities do that for you as part of your whole-company backup plan? That would be pretty cool.
I know you can use pop (and maybe imap) to pull email out of GMail. but can you recommend a product that can handle slurping and backing up all the mail for your domain?
You can also do it direct from the web UI. Just select all your documents from the Google Docs homescreen, click on the "Download..." link in the righthand column, and it will ask you what formats you want then generate a zip file to download.
I don't know of a command line script that uses OAuth (GDocsBackup has a command line mode but uses password auth.) Anyone?
Agree, I use backupify.com to backup my FB, Twitter, Gmail and Docs.
The thing about unreliable customer service is really bad, but you just can't relly on one company, even Google.
I agree. Using a third party service is reasonable. The important thing is having a backup plan.
Shameless plug: This is why I wrote my app, CloudPull. CloudPull backs up your Google Docs, Calendars, and Contacts to your Mac. If for any reason you are unable to access your Google account, CloudPull ensures that you have backups of your Google data on your Mac.
So your reply about atrocious customer service (i.e., a post about a PAYING customer being unable to get access to his file) is to say "well, you should have backed up"?
The real story here is that a paying customer was unable to get anything better than a free user.
FWIW, I must be lazy or something, but I don't think the user of a VERSIONED online document storage service should be reasonably be expected to also have his/her own backups. What the hell am I paying for then?
If I park my car and don't lock the doors, and come back to find it gone, is the story that I'm an idiot for leaving a car unlocked, or is the story that the neighborhood is unsafe?
They're both problems, but I can actually solve one of them myself. That doesn't excuse the $BAD_THING that happened, but it does offer me options for when it inevitably does.
The issue here is that he paid someone else to do it.
So in your analogy: You park your car at a garage with a guard, pay them to keep it safe and leave your car unlocked. And when you come back it's gone.
Yes he could have done something to make it less likely it, but he also explicitly paid someone else to handle it for him.
Personal responsibility can never be outsourced.
If one does not want to lose something, one makes an independent backup.
Google or whoever offers a probabilistically reliable system at a certain price. If one does not like the odds, pay a little more for another backup. Recurse. (Or just curse when data is lost.)
Do you backup your backups? And backup your backup backups? You have to draw the "good enough" line somewhere, and to most people, Google backing up their stuff is backed up enough.
Sure, and that's why we're moving off Google for hosted Apps.
I entirely agree- When things are mission critical to you, you need them in an environment where you can control it, back it up properly, and ensure it stays up.
We're not a priority to Google (Understandably.)
For things that really matter to your company, you should bring them in-house, so you can ENSURE they're backed up, and available when necessary. At least that way when things do fail, you can make fixing it a top priority, rather than a nice-to-have.
I don't follow. Why does the fact that you have to do your own backups mean that you can't use Google (or, conversely, why does using Google mean that you can't do your own backups)?
You certainly can pay to use Google Documents and do your own backups. It's just that doing so would defy the biggest appeal of the service. The appeal is that Google handles day-to-day operations for you.
There's more to "day-to-day operations" than backups.
The reality is that Google is much less likely to damage or lose your data than you are, but it's always good to keep extra copies around locally. This is important for many reasons, like access when either Google or your whole net connection is unavailable, and more flexibility with the data.
I think you are unfairly contrasting he flaws of something that exists against he perfection of something you want to exist.
In-house IT fails plenty of the time also, and plenty of organization cannot afford to fix some failures. One must consider the probabilities in all cases.
key, I think, is to make sure that more than one entity needs to screw it up. If it's really important, make that three entities. But the point is, if google hosts your email, make sure you have backups somewhere else.
Personally, I think this applies to yourself, too. As much as possible, make it difficult for you to overwrite your own backups before they expire. If possible, encrypt and outsource.
"You always backup" is an oversimplification. If you run a medium-size company, chances are, you don't back up stuff yourself. Instead, you pay someone else to do it. You trust them to do it right. This article raises a good question. Why can't you trust Google to do it right as well?
You should always have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site (disaster recovery) these are completely separate from "it's in the cloud so I don't have to worry about it." And this is why I personally dislike "the cloud" because too many people rely on it and don't have a proper plan in place. You can rely on it sure, but don't only rely on it.
A decent hoster or mail service provider takes care of that for you. They have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site. You don't take care of that yourself and the backup is entirely transparent to you. This is why service providers can make money: because they can take care of things for you. It is their raison d'être. Taking care of that yourself is as ridiculous as hosting the email servers yourself. It's not cost effective anymore. The only conclusion from this story is that Google is not a decent hoster or email service provider. The company using them can be excused for expecting better service and they are rightfully moving their business elsewhere.
And to address who does it, it doesn't matter. Someone in the company should be in charge of doing the backups. If no one else will, then take it upon yourself to do so. If you have a medium sized company, someone in your IT department should be doing it. And if you are a large company, there is simply no excuse.
