Backing Up Google Workspace Gmail

What items can be backup?

You can back up Gmail users' mailboxes. A mailbox backup also includes the Calendar and Contacts data. Optionally, you can choose to back up the shared calendars.

The following items are skipped during a backup:

• The Birthdays, Reminders, Tasks calendars
• Folders attached to calendar events
• The Directory folder in Contacts

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

• Appointment slots
• The conferencing field of an event
• The calendar setting All-day event notifications
• The calendar setting Auto-accept invitations (in calendars for rooms or shared spaces)

The following Contacts items are skipped, due to Google People API limitations:

• The Other contacts folder
• The external profiles of a contact (Directory profile, Google profile)
• The contact field File as

What items can be recovered?

The following items can be recovered from a mailbox backup:

• Mailboxes
• Email folders (According to Google terminology, "labels". Labels are presented in the backup software as folders, for consistency with other data presentation.)
• Email messages
• Calendar events
• Contacts

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

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

Limitations

• Contact photos cannot be recovered
• The Out of office calendar item is recovered as a regular calendar event, due to Google Calendar API limitations

To start backup Gmail mailboxes

1. Click Google Workspace.
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations were added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose users' 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 individual user mailboxes, expand the Users node, select All users, select the users whose mailboxes you want to back up, and then click Backup.

4. On the protection plan panel:

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

Full-text search

This option defines whether the email messages content is indexed by the cloud agent.

The preset is: Enabled.

If this option is enabled, the messages content is indexed and you can search messages by their content. Otherwise, only searching by subject, sender, recipient, or date is available.

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

The index occupies 10-30 percent of storage space occupied by the mailbox backups. To learn the exact value, click Backup storage > Cloud applications backups and view the Index size column. You may want to disable full-text search in order to save this space. The value in the Index size column will decrease to a few megabytes after the next backup. This minimal amount of metadata is necessary to perform a search by subject, sender, recipient, or date.

When you re-enable full-text search, the software indexes all of the backups previously created by the protection plan. This also takes some time.

To recover of mailboxes or mailbox items 

• Recover mailboxes

1. Click Google Workspace.
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations were added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose backed-up data you want to recover. Otherwise, skip this step.

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

   If the user was deleted, select the user in the Cloud applications backups section of the Backup storage tab, and then click Show backups.

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

4. Select a recovery point.

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

5. Click Recover > Entire mailbox.

6. If multiple Google Workspace organizations are added to the Cyber Protection service, click 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 in the Cyber Protection service, you must select a new target organization from the available registered organizations.

7. In Recover 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-original organization is selected, you must specify the target mailbox.

   You cannot create a new target mailbox during recovery. To recover a mailbox to a new one, first you need to create the target mailbox in the desired Google Workspace organization, and then let the cloud agent synchronize the change. The cloud agent automatically synchronizes with Google Workspace every 24 hours. To synchronize the change 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 Proceed to confirm your decision.

• Recover mailbox items
  

1. Click Google Workspace.
2. If multiple Google Workspace organizations were added to the Cyber Protection service, select the organization whose backed-up data you want to recover. Otherwise, skip this step.

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

   If the user was deleted, select the user in the Cloud applications backups section of the Backup storage tab, and then click Show backups.

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

4. Select a recovery point.

   To see only the 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 obtain the list of the 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 content. The last two options yield results only if the Full-text search option was enabled during backup. The language of the message fragment being searched 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 that you want to recover. To be able to select folders, click the "recover folders" icon:

   Additionally, you can do any of the following:

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

9. If multiple Google Workspace organizations were added to the Cyber Protection service, click 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 in the Cyber Protection service, you must select a new target organization from the available registered organizations.

10. In Recover 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-original 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 Proceed to confirm your decision.