G Suite backup with Veeam

[jeanmatar]

Hello everyone !

My company is currently migrating to G Suite and we were wondering if it would be possible to backup emails from G Suite using Veeam (similar to office 365).

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you in advance

Jean Matar

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jean,

G Suite is not supported by Veeam now. Thanks!

[ttatum]

Vitaliy -
Can you confirm for the Forum users whether or not this is something that is on Veeam's roadmap? We understand this is not a current offering, but would like to know if Veeam is working on a solution and where it is in the development cycle. I have seen and heard of a lot of interest, so it seems like it would be something Veeam would be working on...

We too are migrating to GSuite and will likely consider using afi in the interim.
https://afi.ai/g-suite-backup

[Gostev]

Confirming that we're not currently working on this. Thanks!

[Updated]

Cannot imagine why o365 and not gsuites

[Gostev]

Purely business considerations. For starters, G-Suite has a few times smaller market share than O365. So anything we build for or around O365 will result in a few times more revenue for Veeam.

Also, G-Suite customers seem to be skewed towards education, so most of the data they have will not be critical enough to justify spending their limited budget on backing it up. For example, my kids' school uses G-Suite, and I can't imagine the school backing up their mailboxes or files in Drive. Perhaps only teachers mailboxes - so just a few dozens. That would be like $50/yr to Veeam, which is less than the cost we incur to process a single support case.

To sum up, a few times smaller market with customers being a few time less willing to pay for backup => O365 is better for our business by an order of magnitude in terms of ROI.

[Josh S]

I just went searching to see if Veeam supports G-Suite backup and was plesantly surprised when I found this active thread discussing it.

Just wanted to add my thoughts to the discussion. We are a large high school in Australia and currently use Veeam B&R Enterprise for our onsite server infrastructure. Couldn't be happier as it works great and we don't have any significant issues with it.

We have also become a G-Suite school over the last 1-2 years and are rapidly moving cloud based. The trend that we are seeing with other schools is that G-Suite is generating a lot of interest and schools are starting to move to the platform away from Microsoft (cloud/Onsite) as the devices (Chromebooks) are generally cheaper and the software is better designed for education. I predict a large uptake of G-Suite in schools over the next couple of years as word of mouth spreads and experiences are shared with other schools.

Although we are very interested in exploring a backup solution for our G-Suite data (Primarily data in Google Drive) I can confirm that a lot of school's won't neccessarily place the same value on the data or plan for disaster as we do. I see it all the time sadly. A lot of schools will consider this important though, particularly high schools as student work becomes more important as they get closer to completing their schooling.

Perhaps another way to look at it in business terms as well is that as we move further into the cloud space we have begun to reduce our on-site foot print. This has meant that we are spending less on Veeam licencing now than two years ago as it is simply no longer needed. Having a G-Suite option available could be a good way of retaining some educational customers as the customers move away from their traditional Microsoft setups.

Just wanted to share that and register my interest in seeing G-Suite support developed. I obviously understand that it needs to be profittable to justify development so I hope that it might reach that point sooner rather than later.

[SAFA_IT]

The trouble with not supporting a particular platform is that it drives users to other backup suppliers. The only reason I have a Synology NAS is because it is bundled with software that backs up G Suite - including Team Drives.

I also use 'Got Your Back' (GYB) - a command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your computer using Gmail's API over HTTPS. You can find the project on GitHub.

[saahi]

We have had few times questions about G-Suite backup and almost in all cases customer has chosen other product than Veeam because lack of G-Suite backup.

[Gostev]

Well, if they need to backup G-Suite, then they certainly cannot choose Veeam so what's the news here?

[SAFA_IT]

As Veeam has NAS backup support, you could use Active Backup for Google Workspace which is free on supported Synology NAS devices. Then back up the Synology NAS using Veeam.

[soncscy]

As an MSP, I'm curious if some of you who are using GSuite backup items can share what the restore narrative looks like. I get this rather uncommonly, but enough that I would like to know what it looks like.

1. Are restores to original location?
2. Do you need to "stage" the restore to a local point first?
3. Does the backup preserve the sharing on the items at all?
4. What content is being protected most often?

I've had fairly long "discussions" with potential clients where they're building out an infrastructure and GSuite seems like it's tempting, but I usually try to dissuade from it as I see google as a black box, but if I'm missing something, I'd love to hear it. I checked out some of the links here and tried it with my private accounts, and I was not impressed as it mostly was just heavily orchestrated curl; getting data back into Gsuite was non-trivial.

[SAFA_IT]

In my situation, G Suite (as it was then) was only introduced for email. Some users had a use for Team Drives, but mostly people store MS compatible documents rather than native Google documents.

To restore, I load up a console and the files or emails get sent back to where they came from with permissions restored.

From those I have looked at, Google backups work by converting (say) Google Docs to an Word. This is not ideal, but better than nothing. It is mostly word documents, Excel and Powerpoint that are protected. If the originals were not protected elsewhere by Veeam I would be less content with the Google Workspace backup, but it works well enough and the email backup / restore works without problems.

I think backup for Google Workspace is a weak area and I would not recommend Google Workspace over Office 365, but the email works very well and Google support is outstanding when you need it (not often).