Cloud-based email services such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 dominate the market for organizational email for good reason. Dealing with the constant onslaught of spam and online attacks is hard, as those traumatized by running mail servers in the “good old days” can attest.
While email service providers excel at their primary functions of sending, receiving, and storing emails, they prioritize availability and uptime over backup and recovery. Depending solely on their built-in protection systems can leave organizations vulnerable to data loss. Although it’s exceedingly rare for email service providers to lose data due to system failures—all modern email systems are distributed and replicated in virtualized storage—they cannot safeguard against every risk. Here are some scenarios we’ve encountered where a separate email backup solution was useful:
- Recover from human error: This is the big one. People often accidentally delete important messages or clean out old messages too aggressively, inadvertently including critical conversations in a mass deletion. Backups ensure that these messages can be retrieved.
- Ease employee turnover: When employees leave, it’s essential to deactivate their email accounts for security reasons. However, information in their accounts may be vital for ongoing projects or legal purposes. Backups preserve this data for future access.
- Mitigate cyber threats: Phishing attacks are commonplace today. If an employee falls victim to one, their email account could be compromised and data lost. Worse still, the attacker could install malware—even ransomware, though that’s not a significant real-world concern for Apple-only installations—that could result in email data loss. While training employees to recognize and avoid phishing attacks is crucial, backups provide an essential safety net for anyone who makes a mistake.
- Facilitate data migration and archiving: Organizations often need to migrate email data from one system or user to another. While it’s rarely necessary or desirable to migrate everything—all the mail from the past year may be sufficient—it can be helpful to maintain archival access to historical communications.
In fact, both Google and Microsoft explicitly state that they store data for only a limited time and recommend employing a backup service. (The specifics may differ, but generally, you can retrieve a deleted email within 30 days, after which it may be recoverable for an additional 14 or 30 days.) Numerous companies provide email backup services, many of which are quite similar. The list below highlights some of the most common services, but we encourage you to reach out for recommendations based on your email service provider and organization size.
- CloudAlly offers unlimited data retention and extends its backup capabilities beyond email to encompass platforms such as Box, Dropbox, and Salesforce.
- CubeBackup focuses exclusively on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. It provides a cost-effective solution by allowing users to utilize their own local or remote storage.
- Backupify and Datto SaaS Protection are from the same company and offer the same backup capabilities, but they serve different market segments. Datto further enhances its branded services with a range of business continuity and data protection tools.
- Dropsuite provides unlimited storage and also supports QuickBooks Online backup. It features a flexible backup cadence, with email backups up to 12 times per day.
- MSP360 Managed Backup is a feature-rich solution that, while more complex and potentially more expensive than those from competitors, offers extensive customization and supports a wide range of storage providers.
- Spanning goes beyond Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 with Salesforce backups. It offers highly granular restores, enabling the recovery of individual emails. Its FLEXspend feature simplifies backup expenditures when transitioning between platforms.
- SpinBackup offers disaster recovery services at an affordable price point, and its developer, Spin.ai, provides a wide range of security solutions beyond backup, including data leak and ransomware protection.
- Synology Active Backup includes free add-ons for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 that back up cloud data to a Synology NAS. It’s an excellent solution for avoiding ongoing expenses.
As important as an email backup solution is for protecting against data loss, we urge you to proceed carefully when selecting one. If you end up with data that exists solely in a particular solution, legal retention requirements or the inability to export data in a non-proprietary format may lock you into paying for it indefinitely. Ideally, keep all data live so you can transition to a different solution to meet changing needs. Again, please contact us for help picking the most appropriate solution for your needs.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Rasi Bhadramani)