Google Workspace – Local Backup for Google Apps for Business

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Is there a way to backup the entire organisations documents locally?

We aren't so much worried about data loss as we are access: what happens if our internet connection goes down? (and it has in the past). How can we keep a local copy of the entire organisations google documents in such an event?

We have looked at other web-app solutions, but none of them provide the service we are after (eg backupify, insynchq etc).

Best Answer

You could use CloudHQ

Cloud HQ offers services to sync Dropbox, Basecamp, Evernote, Google Docs, SugarSync, and Box. In addition, if you purchase an Enterprise tier account you will be able to manage multiple user accounts, Google Apps Admin, and Dropbox for Teams.

I honestly don't know how I landed on this question but I just took a test run on CloudHQ yesterday to see how well it works. I have been utilizing Google Docs for quite a while but I'm trying to find a way to get the 'old guys' who are deeply entrenched in their Office workflows to hop on-board.

Here's how it went:

  1. Signed up for a free account (50 files one time sync, 1gb limit)
  2. Created a synchronization pair between Google Docs and Dropbox, this required that I authorize CloudHQ to use Google through OAuth and Dropbox by subscribing CloudHQ to the event feed (which can be found if you login to your Dropbox account online.
  3. Configured Google Docs to only sync one of my collections
  4. Configured Dropbox so that only one subfolder is synced
  5. Started a one-way sync to dump my docs from Google to Dropbox

The sync took a little while to complete but it ended up downloading twice what my available quota specified (98 files vs 50). All the files were dumped in the corresponding Office 2003 formats into folders matching the structure used on my Docs acct. I found it interesting that, where a file is contained in multiple collections online, that same file is downloaded to multiple locations to match the structure.

Free accounts are basically useless because of the trivial quota schemes but paid have no transfer limits attached. Although I didn't get a chance to try it, CloudHQ supports continuous sync (constant updates) as well as two-way-sync with conflict resolution.

Note: While I'll probably never be able to convince the company I work for to switch to using this service, I'll probably eventually adapt it for my own use. In the mean time, if you'd like to increase my quota so I can explore the service more feel free to use my referral link to sign up.

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