NinjaOne SaaS Backup for Google Workspace Review

Starting with deployment, the setup process was clearly outlined in a few simple steps: install the Marketplace application, sign in to accept permissions, then select accounts to back up and whether to enable AutoDiscover. The entire process took less than five minutes.

Our initial backup started at 2:22pm and finished before midnight. During the backup, the portal displays which accounts are queued to be protected, with a progress bar showing the overall percentage completed. This is a clean, functional approach to progress tracking that does not require constant page refreshing.

By default, Google Workspace and M365 email backups are listed together within the NinjaOne portal. This can be changed to sort them by groups, which is useful for MSPs managing multiple client environments.

NinjaOne SaaS Backup covers Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Google Drive, and Shared Drives. Google Forms, Sites, and Chats are not backed up. The inclusion of Tasks is a minor differentiator that most competitors do not offer.

There is nothing to fault in the coverage of the core workloads, but the lack of Chat and Forms support means NinjaOne does not match the coverage of products like AvePoint or SpinOne.

The 7/10 reflects solid coverage of the six core workloads held back by those three missing areas.

Retention is unlimited by default, but you can choose to limit retention to fourteen months, four years, or seven years. The main limitation is policy flexibility. You can only have one retention policy at a time unless you purchase the Archiver add-on.

Policies apply to every account in a given workload by default and narrowing scope to individual or departmental accounts is only available on the Archiver plan. For organizations with specific compliance requirements around differentiated retention, this will be a challenge.

When users are suspended in Google Workspace, because they have left the business for example, data is retained by NinjaOne. If an account is backed up and then becomes inactive later, then NinjaOne will display a gray checkmark next to it instead of a blue one. Suspended users are not billed. However, if a user is already suspended before onboarding NinjaOne, their data will not be captured.

The lower score here reflects the policy limitations around retention, and the fact important functionality is locked behind the Archiver add-on.

NinjaOne has an effective and straightforward recovery process. Hovering over a Gmail or Drive account shows the option to restore, making the entry point easy to find.

Restoring a full mailbox (727 MB) to a new folder in the same mailbox took two hours and eleven minutes. NinjaOne provides timestamps and estimations for backups to complete. In this instance, the platform provided an estimated time of four hours and twenty nine minutes at the start, so the actual restores completed faster than projected. Items are restored in real-time as the job runs.

Single item restores took around a minute to restore. Email can be restored to its original label, a different existing label, or a new label, which provides useful flexibility. Only the highest-level admins can perform cross-user restores.

NinjaOne offers an Advanced Search tab that supports granular functionality including 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.

NinjaOne allows end users to view and recover their own historical emails and files, once an admin grants access, which can significantly reduce operational overhead in MSP and mid-market environments.

Beyond day-to-day recovery, we also looked at how the platform holds up in less routine scenarios.

A notable capability is cross-platform restore. You can actually restore Gmail to other types of email accounts (i.e. M365) in your NinjaOne tenant if needed.

When migrating one account to another, you can specify a time period for which data to grab. This cross-platform restore capability is unusual and could be valuable in migration or disaster recovery scenarios.

Unfortunately, there is no malware scanning capability. For organizations that need threat detection as part of their backup strategy, this is a gap. Products like SpinOne and Redstor offer ransomware detection or malware scanning.

Resilience matters most when something goes wrong, so day-to-day backup health monitoring was the next thing we assessed.

Fortunately, no backups failed during our testing. But if a backup does fail, NinjaOne will keep retrying instead of giving up, and admins are notified via email. The System Status tab shows the health of recent backup, download, restore, and migration jobs.

The broader NinjaOne portal shows how many backup jobs were successful, currently running, or retrying after encountering a problem. Admins can receive real-time alerts under several conditions, which is positive as some of the other backup platforms we tested only support daily or weekly email summaries.

NinjaOne offers very strong governance controls with detailed visibility into who did what within the platform.

NinjaOne keeps three separate audit logs for message and file activity, user activity, and system activity. All logs are exportable as CSV, which is essential for compliance teams and auditors.

Admins can adjust user permissions and assign roles below their own level. Cross-user restores are locked behind the highest level of permissions, which NinjaOne refers to as migrations.

SSO and two-factor authentication can be enforced on login. The platform is compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR. NinjaOne's FedRAMP authorization covers NinjaOne for Government, and we couldn't confirm that SaaS Backup is in scope.

The platform does not support Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption, which is worth noting for organizations that require direct control over encryption keys.

The 9/10 here reflects three exportable audit logs plus SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance, one of the strongest governance packages we saw across the backup solutions we tested.

NinjaOne offers a very strong commercial model, designed primarily with MSPs in mind. SaaS Backup can be purchased as either backup only or with the Archiver upgrade. Pricing is per-seat with unlimited storage, subject to a pooled fair-use allowance of 250GB per paid seat across all of a customer's data (for MSPs, across all their clients).

Going over can mean buying extra seats or having storage restricted. The portal clearly shows which accounts are billable and which are non-billable. The wider NinjaOne support team is generally knowledgeable and responsive.

The 8/10 reflects per-seat pricing with generous pooled storage, transparent billable/non-billable visibility in the portal, and a model that fits MSP economics cleanly. If you are already using NinjaOne for endpoint management, patching, or other functions, adding SaaS Backup is a no-brainer.

Pulling all of this together, NinjaOne SaaS Backup is a reliable product that does the fundamentals, as well as advanced features, well. Deployment is fast, recovery is dependable, search is strong, and governance is excellent. Another key strength is its integration into the broader NinjaOne ecosystem, which makes it an attractive option for MSPs who want to consolidate backups and endpoint management with one vendor.

The limitations are in retention flexibility and workload coverage. Without the Archiver add-on, retention policies are rigid and cannot be differentiated by user or group. Chat, Forms, and Sites are not supported. There is no malware scanning capability.

These gaps are unlikely to be major for the majority of MSPs, but may be dealbreakers for organizations with specific compliance or security requirements.

On balance, NinjaOne SaaS Backup earns its score by doing the core job well. Backups run reliably, restores are fast and flexible, search is genuinely strong, and the governance tooling is among the best we tested. For MSPs already standardized on the NinjaOne platform, adding SaaS Backup is a natural extension that consolidates tooling and avoids another vendor relationship — and for SMBs that value simplicity, predictable per-seat pricing, and unlimited storage, the product is a credible choice on its own.

Who it’s for: MSPs and SMBs that want a straightforward Google Workspace backup with per-seat pricing and generous pooled storage. Also teams already on or considering the NinjaOne platform looking to consolidate backup with endpoint management and patching under one vendor.

Who should look elsewhere: Large teams that need differentiated retention policies by user, group, or department should weigh AvePoint or Acronis instead. Organizations that treat malware scanning as a non-negotiable part of their backup strategy should look at SpinOne or Druva.