Top 10 Google Workspace Backup Services

AvePoint covers all of the workloads you would expect, with the option to expand into Google Classroom and Google Directory. Classroom and Directory support extend AvePoint’s relevance to education-sector organizations. AvePoint is one of only two products tested (alongside Redstor) that supports Google Classroom.

Retention policies are the most customizable we tested. The platform uses containers that workloads are placed into, and each container can have its own custom retention period and storage location. For multinational organizations that need to comply with different data residency and retention laws across regions, the container-based model is exceptionally well suited. AvePoint supports BYOS (bring your own storage) and BYOK (bring your own key).

Governance is the strongest of all platforms tested. The System Auditor provides clear visibility into all actions performed within the portal. Audit logs are retained for three years, have granular filters, and can be bulk exported. AvePoint is the only product we tested that allows in-house deletion of individual backup records – typically, this requires contacting vendor support.

Backup health monitoring is exceptional. When Google Chat failed to back up during testing, this was clearly visible in the dashboard with a large red X. We also received a failed status email notification. Drilling down further revealed how long backups had been failing, and we could generate an exportable report on the failure with a direct link to the relevant knowledge base article.

Backups are always fully immutable. AvePoint monitors for suspicious behaviors rather than traditional signature-based malware scanning. It looks for patterns such as mass file encryption, bulk deletion of files, or suspicious admin activity. Snapshots are color-coded: green indicates safe restore points, yellow flags unusual activity, and red marks potential ransomware-affected backups.

A standout recovery feature is the ability to select different recovery points for different workloads when performing a full account restore. We did not see this capability in any other product tested. The main trade-off is the search interface, which can be clunky, and AvePoint does not allow searching or previewing the body of emails.

Single-item restores complete in under a minute. Google mailboxes can be restored from time-based snapshots, and data can be restored to the same or a different user account or Shared Drive. End User Recovery can be enabled in settings, allowing users to recover files they have accidentally deleted without needing an admin.

However, full-mailbox restores are slow. We restored a mailbox with 728 MB of emails to another account and it took 16 hours and 35 minutes. This is the slowest restore time we recorded across all 11 products. Any organization that might need to recover a full mailbox in a time-sensitive scenario should factor this into their evaluation.

Backups are immutable by default. CloudAlly stores all backup data on Amazon Web Services, completely separate from Google’s infrastructure. In the event of a significant Google outage, your backups remain accessible. CloudAlly also supports bring-your-own-storage, allowing you to direct backups to your own Amazon S3 bucket.

CloudAlly admins are separated from the Google Workspace admin role, which reduces blast radius if Google Workspace credentials are compromised. If a bulk restore is needed, CloudAlly recommends contacting their support team for assistance.

CloudAlly is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR and HIPAA compliant, and encrypts all data in transit and at rest using AES-256. MFA and SSO are supported. Data residency options include the US, UK, Ireland, multiple European regions, Japan, and Australia. However, CloudAlly does not support SOC 2, FedRAMP, or BYOK encryption.

There are some coverage gaps to be aware of. Google Sites, Forms, and Chats are not supported. Backups run once per day by default unless you purchase the 3x per day add-on. And there is no ransomware scanning capability. The lack of advanced compliance certifications means CloudAlly isn’t the right fit for highly regulated environments, but for most SMB and mid-market tenants, it delivers exactly what’s needed.

NinjaOne offers an Advanced Search tab that supports AND/OR conditions, attachment name and content search, and keyword matching. You can drill down into Drives to locate specific items. This is one of the stronger search implementations we tested across any of the products we reviewed.

Restoring a full mailbox (727 MB) to a new folder took two hours and eleven minutes, completing faster than the platform's own four-hour estimate. Single-item restores took around a minute. End users can view and recover their own historical emails and files. A notable capability is cross-platform restore — you can restore Gmail to M365 accounts in your NinjaOne tenant if needed.

NinjaOne keeps three separate audit logs for message and file activity, user activity, and system activity. All logs are exportable as CSV. The platform is compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR — one of the most complete governance packages we saw across the backup solutions we tested. NinjaOne’s FedRAMP authorization covers its endpoint management platform, not SaaS Backup.

SSO and two-factor authentication can be enforced on login. Admins can adjust user permissions and assign roles below their own level. Cross-user restores are locked behind the highest level of permissions, which adds a layer of protection.

Retention is unlimited by default, but options are limited to four presets: unlimited, 14 months, 4 years, or 7 years. You can only have one retention policy at a time unless you purchase the Archiver add-on. Narrowing scope to individual or departmental accounts is only available on the Archiver plan.

Coverage includes Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Drive, and Shared Drives. Google Chat, Forms, and Sites are not supported. There is no malware scanning capability, and the platform does not support BYOK encryption. These gaps are unlikely to be major for the majority of MSPs, but may be dealbreakers for organizations with specific compliance or security requirements.

Retention is one of Druva’s strongest areas. Daily snapshots are configurable up to 1,000 days, weekly up to 100 weeks, and monthly up to 360 months. Gmail and Drive can be assigned different retention periods, and exclusions from backups can be set based on path, folder, or file type. Different retention policies can be enforced for specific users by creating separate Profiles.

Users that are suspended in Google Workspace are automatically marked as Preserved in Druva, archiving their data. As long as you remain within your license limits, preserved users are not charged for. Unlimited retention and legal hold are both available on higher-tier plans.

Druva offers advanced ransomware recovery functionality via its paid Cyber Resiliency add-on. This includes the ability to quarantine infected snapshots and restore data from known clean snapshots. Admins can also use the Data Lock add-on to prevent snapshots from ever being deleted, an action that is irreversible once applied. A managed data detection and response service is also available as an add-on.

Backup data is stored in AWS data centers. Seven distinct admin roles are available with differing levels of access. RBAC, MFA, SSO, and geofencing are all supported. Audit logs are detailed, with separate user and admin audit trails, and can be exported in CSV or HTML format.

We restored 695 MB of Gmail data to another user in two hours and 24 minutes, with data populating in Google Workspace immediately as the job progressed. Single-item restores completed in seconds. End-user self-service restore is supported. Mailbox data can be downloaded in Archive, MBOX, or PST format.

The main limitation is search. Searching can only be done on a per-mailbox basis, not across the entire tenant. Deployment took approximately 45 minutes with manual configuration required at multiple stages. Google Chat, Forms, and Sites are not supported. And storage quotas are enforced based on your plan, with pricing not publicly disclosed.

Druva does not publicly disclose per-user pricing. They offer two plans — Enterprise and Elite — with the Elite package supporting eDiscovery, legal holds, and federated search. Several add-ons including quarantine functionality and SIEM integration can also be purchased. The AI chatbot is a standout self-service tool — it provides relevant answers with short walkthrough videos showing how to fix specific issues, which is a level above most competitors’ documentation.

SpinOne is one of the more expensive options when evaluated as a backup-only product, with limited storage compared to like-for-like competitors.

Deploying SpinOne to a Google Workspace tenant was painless. The process followed the typical Google OAuth and Marketplace application setup, and we were prompted to choose a data storage location and which Google services to back up. The only additional step was enabling backups for users — completed quickly without consulting a guide. A five-minute, zero-friction setup is what a 10/10 looks like.

All main services are backed up, and Shared Drives and Chats can be enabled with a simple toggle. Auto-discovery is not on by default, but policies can be created for this. Storage location and retention can be configured per organizational unit. Metadata preservation is comprehensive. The single point dropped from a perfect coverage score reflects the manual toggles for Shared Drives, Chats, Spam, and Trash rather than any real gap in what can be protected.

Restoring a complete mailbox is possible in under five clicks. The UI is clearly labeled, and the restore point selection is straightforward. The granular search is functional but feels clunky — you cannot perform a search inside a selected mailbox, only cross-tenant. Results can then be filtered, but the filtering is not intuitive. There is no bulk restore capability, which means recovering multiple mailboxes during a large-scale incident would be a manual, sequential process.

Locating restore points is easy using the calendar view. Customizable policies can detect suspicious activity, enforce password changes, and suspend users. Malware scanning with automatic restore to a known-good backup is a genuine resilience capability. But with no bulk recovery and no additional checks once an account has restore permissions, the overall resilience posture is mixed.

SpinOne has excellent reporting capability. Alerts are sent in real time when restores, downloads, and deletions start and finish. The dashboard displays data well, though the volume of information from the combined auditing and backup functions can make it overwhelming to parse. MFA and IP address restrictions can be enabled, along with custom security policies. Assigning permissions is simple — three clicks to grant a user access. The main limitation is that MFA cannot be enforced by the admin; each user must enable it themselves.

SpinOne offers multiple licensing plans with add-ons for archive licenses and extra storage. At $36 per mailbox per year for 30 GB, SpinOne is justifiable for buyers who use the security and auditing capabilities, but expensive for anyone treating it as a pure backup tool. Support was responsive — live chat answered within a minute, and escalated questions received detailed email responses within 24 hours.

Acronis protects Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, Calendar, Chat, Forms, Keep, Meet recordings, Sites, and Vault. You can configure up to six backups per day, which is the highest frequency we saw across all products tested.

Creating customizable backup plans is one of the most in-depth and straightforward we’ve used. You can store backup data in local folders, network locations, or public cloud storage services. Groups can be created for different user tiers with separate retention and storage settings. We were impressed that Acronis has managed to provide this amount of customization and still keep the admin console relatively simple.

When a mailbox was removed from backups to simulate an off-boarded employee, previous backup data could still be recovered. The mailbox displayed a “Not protected” status and could easily be re-added to a backup plan if needed.

Acronis offers two immutable storage options: Governance and Compliance. Reports can be scheduled hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly and delivered as PDF or Excel files. This level of granularity in report scheduling was not matched by any other solution in the comparison.

Admin alerts go beyond backup failures. You can set up alerts for infrastructure health, like CPU temperature, hardware changes and network usage anomalies. Acronis also offers configurable protection plans for malware protection, though malware scanning does not support RAR, 7z, or ISO file types.

Acronis is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified, with clear GDPR documentation. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and you can bring your own encryption keys. You need a separate admin account to manage Acronis, rather than just using your Google Workspace credentials – which we think is a good thing. Multi-factor authentication is required by default.

Acronis supports more than 50 global data center locations across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, so there is a lot of flexibility for data residency.

There is no keyword search across the entire tenant – search can only be performed within individual mailboxes. There is no bulk restore capability. And the deployment process took around one hour, which is longer than average.

Afi covers Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, and Calendar. Google Groups and Directory information can also be backed up, which is uncommon but welcome. Google Chats can be backed up but must be configured via the Google API, which is a more complicated deployment process. Google Forms are not supported. Deployment took approximately five minutes via a simple three-step process.

Retention is unlimited by default and fully customizable. Different retention policies can be assigned to different resources. If you delete or suspend a Google user, their data is still archived and Afi does not charge for these users. Cross-user restore is also supported — during testing, we suspended a user and successfully restored their data to another account.

Performing a restore is straightforward. Restoring an entire 752 MB Google Workspace account to a new mailbox took 3 hours and 43 minutes. All of a user's Gmail, Drive, Contacts, and Calendar data from a given snapshot can be restored together at once. Search functionality is effective, with filtering by workload, group, or entire domain.

Afi supports heuristics-based ransomware detection and immutable backups with a lockdown mode. However, there is no bulk recovery of multiple users simultaneously, and access is completely dependent on having a Google admin login — if your Google Workspace environment is compromised and admin access is lost, you would also lose access to your backup data.

Audit logs cover admin activity and are kept for 3 years, exportable as CSV. Admins can build Access Groups with different permissions, and Okta or SAML SSO authentication can be enforced. Afi is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and uses AES-256 encryption with BYOK support. Data residency options include the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia.

The main commercial limitation is support — available only via online channels during business hours, with phone support reserved for customers spending $60,000 or more per year. Reporting capabilities lack the granularity of products like AvePoint or SpinOne. Afi is a relatively small vendor with around 20 employees, and the ownership structure is unclear.

The standout feature is the Problems tab. Each problem has a code attached indicating the error, along with a description and a recommended action. This is genuinely helpful for troubleshooting. The Activity tab is clean and easy to navigate with functional filtering.

However, there is no option for real-time email alerts if a backup failure occurs. Status summary reports can be sent daily, weekly, or monthly, but the content cannot be customized. The product could score higher if real-time alerts could be configured for backup failures.

End users can perform self-service restores on their own mailboxes, which is a genuine USP. Search works well, fetching data quickly with filters for date range, folder, and subject. Recovery speed was good for a full mailbox. The restore function is labeled as "Impersonation" rather than "Restore", which is not intuitive.

The entire user cannot be restored at once — Mailbox, Drive, Calendar, and Contacts must be done individually. There is no bulk restore capability, and you cannot perform more than one restore at a time for mailbox items. Backups are stored on AWS, completely separate from Google's infrastructure.

Spanning is SOC 2 certified and compliant with GDPR, POPIA, and CCPA. Data centers are available in the US, Canada, EU, UK, APAC, and South Africa. The platform supports BYOK encryption and API token access, which is very positive for an SMB-focused product.

The main trade-offs are in flexibility. Retention is indefinite by default but can only be set at the tenant level with no per-user or per-group granularity. Backups run once per day with no option to increase frequency. If a Standard license is removed, data is deleted after 60 days, and critically, data cannot be restored during this window. Google Chats, Forms, and Classroom are not supported.

The multi-tenant management capabilities for licensing, billing, and support are unique among the products we tested and represent a genuine advantage for MSP operations. MSPs can choose to give access at either the organization or partner level. Onboarding is a simple five-step process, and new users can be auto-discovered and auto-protected.

Coverage includes Gmail, Google Drive, Shared Drives, Calendar and Contacts. There is no coverage for Google Chat, Forms or Classroom. All workloads were automatically discovered and backed up after deployment. If a user leaves and their mailbox is suspended or deleted in Google, the mailbox is converted to an archived mailbox with all original data kept and recoverable.

Backup and restore speeds are fast. Three daily backups provide good recovery point granularity. Locating a mailbox to restore is extremely simple – the UI isn’t cluttered, and you can initiate a mailbox restore in just four clicks. Snapshots are easy to select from. There is tenant-wide search capability, though the filtering is limited for pinpointing a specific email, and you cannot preview a selected email.

You can bulk restore mailboxes and individual items. However, we were unable to bulk restore multiple items within a single mailbox, or restore multiple items across multiple mailboxes. Cross-user restore is supported within the same tenant, but there is no cross-tenant restore capability.

Two-factor authentication is enforced on account creation. Reports can be filtered by date, event, status, and user in a granular way, and activity logs are fully exportable as CSV. Summary reports with data displayed in bubble and bar charts can be generated.

The main limitations are around backup health visibility. There is no real-time alerting – the daily report can only be set at the partner level, not to individual customers. During testing, we found an error in a backup item, but the backup health indicator didn’t show any issues. Retention can only be set tenant-wide, with no per-user or per-group customization.

IDrive was one of the easiest products to deploy. The entire setup involved choosing a data storage region, installing the Google Marketplace app, and accepting permissions. A non-technical user could comfortably get IDrive up and running. Coverage includes Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Calendar, Contacts, and Classroom. Google Chat and Sites are not supported.

Retention is unlimited by default, with no option to customize. Suspended users are highlighted in red within the portal, and anything that has been backed up continues to be billed. Cross-user restore is supported. Educational institutions receive a 25% discount.

Unlike some competitors that automatically discover and protect all users in a Google Workspace tenant, Spanning requires every user to have an assigned license before their data is backed up. If a user does not have a license, their data is not protected. This makes license management an ongoing administrative responsibility, particularly during onboarding and offboarding.

Full Gmail snapshot restores failed repeatedly during our testing — four consecutive attempts on a 600 MB snapshot all failed after 30 to 60 minutes, with error logs citing internal server errors or invalid label names.

Single-item restores did work. The search functionality is relatively quick, with basic search parameters for keyword, seat, and date/time. Gmail, Drive, Contacts, and Calendar must all be restored separately — there is no way to restore all data at once for a particular user. There is no self-service restore access for end users.

Retention is unlimited by default with no option to change. This is a set-and-forget approach designed for SMBs, not enterprises needing differentiated retention policies.

IDrive is SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, with storage regions available in the USA, EU, UK, and Canada. Backup data is stored in IDrive's own independent data centers, completely separate from Google's infrastructure.

Admin and governance capabilities are basic. The only permission options are full access and read only. There are no granular RBAC controls, no real-time alerting, and audit logs cannot be exported. Backup health monitoring is limited — restore failures produced no real-time notifications, and we had to dig into event logs to find details.

iDrive is best suited for businesses, charities, and budget-conscious teams wanting affordable, simple backup with Google Classroom coverage. IDrive is approximately a third cheaper than most competitors and is perfect for very small teams that need reliable backup without enterprise complexity.