Google Workspace data backup & recovery with Afi – Afi Backup

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Afi backup for Google Workspace provides comprehensive support for the Google Workspace ecosystem, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Shared drives, Contacts, and Calendar data. This article provides a detailed description of data backup and recovery scenarios for these workloads with Afi.

The current guide assumes that you have already installed the Afi application for your Google Workspace tenant, added the tenant to the Afi portal and protected your resources with Afi, otherwise, please follow this article to set up your Google Workspace tenant in Afi - Afi SaaS backup for Google Workspace: Installation Guide.

How to view backup data and navigate across backup snapshots

To view backup data for a resource (user or Shared drive), please go to the Service → Protection tab, locate the backup by searching for its name and click on the Recover button to open the backup browse view. Please note that clicking on Recover on the Protection tab doesn't trigger any actual data restore activities.

When you open a backup, you will set a set of tabs corresponding to workloads included in this backup (Mail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar).

By default, the most recent backup snapshot is opened for browse. You can switch between snapshots inside a backup via the calendar control. Each backup snapshot corresponds to a user/drive state during the period when the backup corresponding to this snapshot was made. If any item (email, file, etc) has been deleted, it will not be shown in the next backup snapshots performed after its deletion, but it will still be accessible in older backup snapshots. The same way, if a file has been modified several times, different backup snapshots contain different versions of this file.

Backup snapshots

To switch to a different backup snapshot, click on the Backup version dropdown and select a backup date that you want to open by clicking on the corresponding day. If several backups were performed on that day, the service will show their start times and you will need to additionally click on the backup time to proceed to the snapshot.

After a backup snapshot is opened, you will be able to view user/drive state at the time of this backup snapshot and launch a data export or restore from this backup snapshot. The service will highlight a backup version from which an export or a restore is performed in the download or recovery settings dialogues.

By default, Afi preserves all backup snapshots and all item versions in the corresponding backup snapshots indefinitely. If you want to limit how long the Afi service keeps backup snapshots or files/emails inside backups, you can configure custom retention settings for your backup SLA policies - Data retention policies in Afi Backup.

Afi backups are forever incremental which means that after an initial full data synchronization the service will synchronize only the following items that were added or changed since the previous backup. Because of this, the service synchronizes a relatively small amount of data during each incremental backup, making incremental backups fast and lightweight in terms of data added to a backup.

Data access security

Afi provides fully explicit and fine-grained access model which allows to configure custom access groups that grant users limited access to backups in a tenant, an organizational unit/group or a custom set of resources. Self-service access for end-users in a Google Workspace tenant to their own backups is disabled by default and can be enabled explicitly by Afi administrators. Please see the following article for a detailed description of the Afi permissions model - Access Management and Self-service for Google Workspace.

Afi audits all user activity related to data export, including data browse, search, export or recovery events. Afi administrators can review these audit events at the Activity → Audit tab in the Afi portal.

Gmail

Afi Gmail backup view resembles native Gmail web interface with email labels hierarchy and email categories. You can navigate across email labels, sort emails under a label by date or other criteria and select specific labels or individual emails for export or recovery.

By default, email browse shows email metadata (From, To, Subject, etc), list of attachments and email body. You can restrict access to email content for service administrators, access group operators or even end-users at the Service → Settings → Access groups tab by disabling Preview email and chats content access permission - Access Management and Self-service for Google Workspace. Here is an example of email browse view when email content preview is restricted:

Search

Afi offers comprehensive search capabilities which allow to easily locate emails matching a specified query, select individual emails from search results for export and recovery or export all emails matching a query in supported export formats (PST, MBOX, EML).

You can use either a basic search mode when you enter a set of terms and the service matches all emails which contain all the specified terms in their body or metadata (To, From, Subject, attachment names, etc) or an advanced search mode where you can specify terms that should be present in specific metadata fields or limit search scope by a time range or by searching across emails that are visible only in the latest backup snapshot.

When you specify several search terms or filters, the service outputs only the following emails that contain all terms and match all filters from a query at the same time. This way you can add additional search terms to a query after reviewing its output to refine query results.

This example shows a basic search query to find all emails which contain terms Afi and Backup in a user mailbox:

Here is a more advanced example with a search query to find emails with terms Afi and Backup in From, with a term export in Subject and sent between the 1st and 16th December 2023:

A user can select specific emails for export or recovery manually or export all emails matching a search query by clicking on the Download button and selecting the Download search results option:

Export

A user can export a whole mailbox or selected emails/email labels by clicking on the Download button and selecting export format. When selecting a label with nested sub labels for export, a resulting export will contain all emails under the selected label as well as all its sub labels.

Email data can be exported in the following most common industry formats:

PST (Personal Storage Table) format best suited for Outlook email client
MBOX format compatible with Mac Mail, Thunderbird and other 3rd party email clients
EML format best suited for exporting individual emails

Using PST export format, you can download Mail, Contacts and Calendar data together in one export:

Once an export is finished, the service sends a notification email to a user who initiated the export with a download link. Also, download links can be found in the corresponding export task details on the Activity → Tasks tab. Export are kept by the service and can be downloaded during 30 days.

Recovery

With Afi a user can restore selected emails, email labels or a whole mailbox to the same or another user mailbox. The following recovery modes are available:

Recover to a separate folder - restore selected data under a specified label in a restore destination mailbox. You can specify your own label name or proceed with a system-generated one (Restored by AFI/<date>).
Overwrite existing content - restore selected data in place. This recovery mode should be used with caution as it will replace items that already exist in a restore destination mailbox in case of a conflict. Any other existing items that don't conflict with data being restored are preserved upon a restore.

Email restore preserves label hierarchy by recreating it under a restore destination label (in case of Recover to a separate folder restore mode) or by reconstructing it in a restore destination mailbox. When a label with sub labels is selected for a recovery, the service recursively restores all emails under this label and its sub labels, recreating the original label hierarchy.

An example below shows how restore to another label looks for a label Reports with sub label Status located under Project A label.

The service recreated the selected label hierarchy under the Restored by Afi/2023-12-16 21:20:53 label in the restore destination mailbox:

Once a restore is finished, the service sends a notification email to a user who initiated the restore. An Afi administrator can monitor pending restores and review finished ones at the Activity → Tasks tab in the Afi portal.

Google Drive

Afi Google Drive backup is available both for user and Shared drives and allows you to browse Drive backup contents, select files and folders for export or recovery as well as search for files or folders matching a specified search query.

Google Drive backup includes the following sections:

My Drive - represents My Drive folder contents in a user's Google Drive
Recent - all file and folders in a current backup snapshot sorted by Last modified date
Trash - represents Bin folder contents in a user's Google Drive
Computers - represents Computers folder contents in a user's Google Drive. This folder contains data synchronized by Google Drive for Desktop application from a user's computer to Google Drive.
Other - contains files and folders owned by a user, but located in other users' drives

Google Drive backup includes support for Google native documents (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides). Google native documents are restored back in native Google formats and exported in DOCX, XLXS, and PPTX formats correspondingly. Afi also supports Google Drawings backup and its export and recovery in SVG format, Google Jamboard backup and its export and recovery in PDF format, as well as Google Apps Script files backup and recovery.