Guide on How to Backup Gmail Google Workspace

What items can be backed up?

You can back up a Gmail user's mailbox. Mailbox backup also includes Calendar and Contacts data. Optionally, you can choose to back up shared calendars.

The following items are skipped during backup:

• Birthday Calendar, Reminders, Tasks
• Folder attached to calendar event
• Directory Folder in Contacts

The following Calendar items are skipped due to the limitations of the Google Calendar API:

• A slot for this
• Conference field of an event
• Calendar settings All-day event notifications
• Calendar settings Receive invitations automatically (in calendars for rooms or shared spaces)

The following Contact items are skipped due to the limitations of the Google People API:

• Other Contacts folders
• External contact profile (Director profile, Google profile)
• File contact field as

What items can be recovered?

The following items can be recovered from the mailbox backup:

• Mailbox
• Email folders (According to Google terminology, "labels". Labels are displayed in the backup software as folders, for consistency with the presentation of other data.)
• Email message
• Calendar events
• Contact

You can use search to find items in a backup, unless the backup is encrypted. Searching in encrypted backups is not supported.

When restoring mailboxes and mailbox items, you can select whether to overwrite the items in the target location.

Limitations

• Contact photos cannot be recovered
• Out of Office calendar items are restored as regular calendar events, due to Google Calendar API limitations

To start a Gmail mailbox backup

1. Click Google Workspace.
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose user data you want to back up. Otherwise, skip this step.

3. Do one of the following:

   • To back up the mailboxes of all users (including mailboxes that will be created in the future), expand the Users node, select All users, and then click Group backup.
   • To back up an individual user's mailbox, expand the Users node, select All users, select the user whose mailbox you want to back up, and then click Backup.

4. On the protection plan panel:

   • Make sure the Gmail item is selected in What to back up.
   • If you want to back up calendars shared with selected users, enable the Include shared calendars switch.
   • Decide if you require full-text search through backed-up email messages. To access this option, click the gear icon > Backup options > Full text search .

Full text search

This option determines whether the content of the email message is indexed by the cloud agent.

The preset is: Enabled.

If this option is enabled, the message content will be indexed and you can search for messages based on their content. Otherwise, only search by subject, sender, recipient or date is available.

The indexing process does not affect backup performance as it is performed by a different software component. Indexing the first (complete) backup may take some time, therefore, there may be a delay between the completion of the backup and the content appearing in the search results.

Indexes occupy 10-30 percent of the storage space occupied by mailbox backups. To know the actual value, click Backup storage > Cloud app backup and look at the Index size column. You may want to disable full-text search to save this space. The value in the Index size column will reduce to a few megabytes after the next backup. This minimal amount of metadata is required to perform searches by subject, sender, recipient or date.

When you re-enable full-text search, the software will index all backups previously made by the protection plan. This also takes time.

To restore a mailbox or mailbox item

• Recover mailboxes

1. Click Google Workspace .
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose backup data you want to restore. Otherwise, skip this step.

3. Expand the Users node, select All users, select the user whose mailbox you want to restore, and then click Recovery.

   If the user has been deleted, select the user in the Cloud app backup section of the Backup storage tab, and then click Show backup.

   You can search for users and groups by name. Wildcards are not supported.

4. Select a restore point.

   To view only recovery points that contain mailboxes, select Gmail in Filter by content .

5. Click Restore > Entire mailbox.

6. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, click a Google Workspace organization to view, change, or specify the target organization.

   By default, the original organization is selected. If this organization is no longer registered with the Cyber Protection service, you must select a new target organization from the available registered organizations.

7. In Restore to mailbox, view, change, or specify the target mailbox.

   By default, the original mailbox is selected. If this mailbox does not exist or a non-native organization is selected, you must specify the target mailbox.

   You cannot create a new target mailbox during recovery. To restore a mailbox to a new one, you first need to create a target mailbox in the desired Google Workspace organization, and then let the cloud agent synchronize the changes. The cloud agent automatically synchronizes with Google Workspace every 24 hours. To sync the changes immediately, in the service console, select the organization on the Google Workspace page, and then click Refresh.

8. Click Start recovery.

9. Select one of the overwriting options:

   • Overwrite existing items
   • Do not overwrite existing items
10. Click Continue to confirm your decision.

• Recover mailbox items

1. Click Google Workspace.
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose backup data you want to restore. Otherwise, skip this step.

3. Expand the Users node, select All users, select the user whose mailbox originally contained the items you want to restore, and then click Recovery.

   If the user has been deleted, select the user in the Cloud app backup section of the Backup storage tab, and then click Show backup.

   You can search for users and groups by name. Wildcards are not supported.

4. Select a restore point.

   To view only recovery points that contain mailboxes, select Gmail in Filter by content .

5. Click Recover > Email messages .

6. Browse to the required folder. If the backup is not encrypted, you can use search to get the list of required items.

   The following search options are available. Wildcards are not supported.

   • For email messages: search by subject, sender, recipient, date, attachment name and message body. The last two options only provide results if the Full text search option is enabled during backup. The language of the searched message fragment can be specified as an additional parameter.
   • For events: search by title and date.
   • For contacts: search by name, email address, and phone number

7. Select the items you want to restore. To be able to select a folder, click the "restore folder" icon.":

   Alternatively, you can do one of the following:

   Click Restore.

   • When an item is selected, click Show content to view its contents, including attachments.  Click the attached file name to download it.
   • Only if the backup is not encrypted, you use search, and select a single item in the search results: click Show version to select the version of the item to restore. You can select any backup version, earlier or later than the selected restore point.

9. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, click a Google Workspace organization to view, change, or specify the target organization.

   By default, the original organization is selected. If this organization is no longer registered with the Cyber Protection service, you must select a new target organization from the available registered organizations.

10. In Restore to mailbox, view, change, or specify the target mailbox.

    By default, the original mailbox is selected. If this mailbox does not exist or a non-native organization is selected, you must specify the target mailbox.

11. In Path, view or change the target folder in the target mailbox. By default, the original folder is selected.
12. Click Start recovery.

13. Select one of the overwriting options:

    • Overwrite existing items
    • Do not overwrite existing items
14. Click Continue to confirm your decision.