OpenText CloudAlly Backup for Google Workspace Review

CloudAlly covers the essential Google Workspace services, with a focus on core workloads: Gmail, Google Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks are all included. Google Sites, Forms, Chats, and Photos are not supported, which is worth weighing if you rely on those applications.

All users and Shared Drives are discovered automatically on setup. Despite the gaps, the coverage will be enough for the majority of teams looking for a Google Workspace backup solution.

CloudAlly provides strong retention capabilities with unlimited retention by default and sensible handling of user lifecycle events. Retention can be customized if needed by contacting support, and different retention policies can be set for separate backup tasks.

Backups run once per day, or you can purchase the add-on for three times per day. On-demand backups are available.

If a mailbox or user is deleted or has their license removed, existing backup data is automatically archived. Archived data can be either retained indefinitely or deleted after a specified period. Users that are suspended in Google Workspace are marked as Archived in CloudAlly automatically. Cross-user restore is supported.

The retention model is well-suited to most SMBs and MSPs, though the need to contact support for customization is less convenient than products like AvePoint or Druva that offer granular retention configuration directly in the portal. It would also be good to see more flexibility for the number of backups available per day.

CloudAlly provides an intuitive, dependable recovery process. The platform performs consistently and makes it easy to recover specific files or entire mailboxes.

Google mailboxes can be restored from time-based snapshots. Data can be restored to the same or a different user account or Shared Drive, which is helpful. There is no preview option when restoring Gmail items.

In our testing, restoring a mailbox with 728 MB of email to another account took under three hours. Restoring a single item was much faster: we restored a single email in less than a minute.

End User Recovery can be enabled in settings, allowing users to recover files they have accidentally deleted without needing an admin.

CloudAlly's resilience capabilities are solid for protecting backups from tampering and enabling recovery, but there are no threat detection capabilities to help identify a point of compromise. You can choose a specific date and time snapshot to restore data from, which is the primary mechanism for selecting a known-good recovery point.

Backups are immutable by default, which prevents them from being altered or deleted after creation. CloudAlly also stores all backup data on Amazon Web Services (AWS), 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. This is a limitation for organizations that need to independently manage large-scale recovery scenarios. The 24/7 live chat availability does mitigate this to some extent, as you would not be waiting until business hours to get help.

CloudAlly provides the visibility you need to confirm backups are running, and recent improvements have brought the monitoring experience closer to the mid-range of this comparison.

Admins can receive email notifications if a backup fails. There is no dashboard or graph displaying overall backup health, but backup failures are noted in the activity logs and are searchable.

During testing, we had one Gmail backup task partially fail, and the only error message was the word “Mail,” which isn’t particularly helpful. The CloudAlly live chat was responsive and able to help diagnose the issue, but ideally the error messages themselves would provide more actionable detail.

Admins can choose to receive emailed reports either daily, weekly, or only upon failure. The backup health monitoring is functional and adequate for SMBs, though it lacks the depth and real-time alerting capabilities of products like AvePoint, SpinOne, or Druva.

CloudAlly provides solid governance controls and security features suitable for most SMB and mid-market environments.

Logs are retained indefinitely for both system and user activity, and are exportable as CSV. Logs can be filtered by date, activity type, and success or failure status.

Any administrator with access to the CloudAlly portal can delete the organization’s entire account. This is a governance risk that should be managed through strict access controls and limiting the number of users with full admin privileges.

MFA via authenticator app and SSO via Microsoft or Google are available. Admins can set granular permissions for which backup services users can access and which actions they are allowed to take.

CloudAlly is ISO 27001 certified, and all backup data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES-256. The platform is GDPR and HIPAA compliant. However, CloudAlly does not support SOC 2, FedRAMP, or BYOK encryption.

Data residency options include the US, UK, Ireland, multiple European regions, Japan, and Australia, all built on AWS infrastructure.

CloudAlly operates a simple, clear and transparent pricing model. Pricing is $3 / user / month or $30 / user / year.

The billing tab in the portal clearly shows which items customers are being billed for and the associated costs. There are no hidden fees or storage caps to manage.

Storage is unlimited as long as you’re backing up all users. This removes one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in SaaS backup pricing and eliminates the need to monitor storage growth over time.

Support is available 24/7 via live chat, with email, web, and phone support also available. During testing, the live chat team was responsive and helpful. This is the most transparent and straightforward commercial model in the comparison.

CloudAlly is a reliable, easy-to-use Google Workspace backup solution with the most transparent pricing model in this comparison. Deployment is very simple, the interface is clean, and 24/7 live chat support is responsive. For organizations that need a straightforward backup product without complexity, CloudAlly is a strong choice.

CloudAlly is owned by OpenText, a publicly traded, multi-billion-dollar enterprise software vendor, which provides confidence in long-term platform stability.

The main issue we ran into was performance. Both backup and restore operations are significantly slower than competitors for larger data sets. The lack of a preview option for Gmail items, once-daily default backup frequency, and vague error messages are additional areas where the product falls short of more feature-rich alternatives.

The lack of ransomware scanning and 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.

Who this is for: SMBs and MSPs that want a simple, affordable, and reliable backup solution with unlimited storage and transparent pricing. Best suited for environments where restore speed is not a critical requirement and simplicity is valued over feature depth.

Who should look elsewhere: Organizations with large mailboxes that need real-time alerting, or ransomware detection should consider AvePoint, SpinOne, or Druva instead.