What Google doesn’t understand: disaster recovery doesn’t eliminate backups

What Google doesn’t understand: disaster recovery doesn’t eliminate backups

Posted by Philippe Creytens at 15:47 on July 15, 2010

During presentations Google people keep referring to their disaster recovery measures. They keep saying that backups are no longer needed. But is that so? Hello Google, never heard of the ‘dummy user’?

The approach to preventing data loss has in my opinion two aspects: a purely technical and an end-user aspect.

True to their nerdy background you wouldn’t expect anything less from Google than that their technical approach would be close to perfection. In this article on the Google Enterprise blog they explain what measures are taken to prevent data loss due to technical hickups.  Great reading if you want to learn all there is to know on the subject of RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and ’synchronous replication’.

What this article boils down to is that, simply put, all data is stored multiple times and in multiple data centers in real time. As a matter of fact, they also compare the cost of alternative solutions for you. The most important fact is that if anything happens to your Google Apps domain, they can switch you over to another data center without any data loss.

But what if the ‘dummy user’ does something wrong?

I guess we’ve all been there. You delete a document only to discover a few weeks later that you really need it. Or the administrator removes a user and at the same time all the user’s Google Docs documents are deleted.

How can you prevent this?

Removed Doc documents are stored for a given period in your trash can. To prevent inadvertent deletions of i.e. template documents, you can assign an admin account as document owner. If you are not the owner of a document deleting it only removes the link to it. Only the document owner can physically and permanently remove a document in Google Apps.

But what about calendars and sites?

Also here a ‘dummy user’ can become a major risk. Except by exporting your calendar manually –but who does that, right– you only need to delete your calendar inadvertently to lose all appointments and meeting data.

Fortunately a few small companies are now providing a solution.

Backupify and SpanningSync offer monthly plans that allow the Google Apps admin to schedule daily backups of all Google Apps data onto Amazon’s S3 infrastructure. Of course you could try to do something similar with scripts to transfer your data to S3 or, soon, Google Storage for Developers but does that make sense?

Or can we expect Google to announce a new service in Google Apps: Google Backup?