Spanning Backup Blog

When Backup Becomes an Afterthought, You Kill Buzz Lightyear

Okay, so you won’t really kill Buzz, but Pixar almost did. Along with the rest of Toy Story 2 back in the late 90s.

See YouTube video here >> Pixar Studio Stories – The Movie Vanishes

After a year of work on those magical animated renderings, a careless RM* command wiped out all of it in the span of about 20 seconds. Then when the Pixar team went to restore from their trusty tape backups, they found that they had been failing for a month. The backups were bad, and all of that work was just gone…

Well, lucky for Pixar, an employee who had been working from home a lot had a copy of a good portion of the lost data stored on their home computer. That’s great for them (and for Toy Story fans) but what would you do in their shoes?

Most IT pros that I know would swear up and down that they are ready for disaster recovery 24/7 and would wag their finger at Pixar for not monitoring thoroughly enough. In fact, quite a few did on reddit yesterday.

Can you honestly tell me that when things get hectic, monitoring your backups won’t be one of the first things that gets shuffled off your to-do list?

It’s time to start looking at monitoring as a key part of backup strategy, and that means backup solutions with monitoring baked right in.

That’s why we included a Google Apps health history when we made our new Spanning Backup Admin Dashboard. This gives our customers complete transparency, so they know exactly what’s happening with their backups each day.

Now, technology has come a long way since the 90s and tape backups, but the lesson that Pixar learned that day still holds true: Monitoring and backup go hand in hand, and letting either become an afterthought can have dire consequences.

Spanning Stats for Google Drive is Live on the Chrome Web Store

Spanning Stats for Google Drive is now live on the Chrome Web Store!

We launched Spanning Stats just one week ago but its already been used to scan more than 50,000 Google Drives, and we’re just getting started. It only takes a few seconds to scan your drive and generate an interactive visual report that shows you exactly how you’re using Google Drive and Docs.

Of course, Google Apps admins can still install Spanning Stats from the Google Apps Marketplace and get an overview report for their whole domain. (Finally, you can see who’s taking up all your storage quota with their MP3 collection!)

So please try it out and let us know what you think. We’re thrilled with the reception Spanning Stats has gotten so far, and we’re eager to hear from you.

Thanks,
Charlie

The 4 Best and 1 Worst Things About Google Drive

Google Drive is finally out and it follows 4 of the 5 suggestions I offered last week on How Google Drive Could Become a Huge Success. Here’s the rundown.

1. Google Apps users are already using a “Google Drive”—keep it intact ✓
My suggestion here was to keep the underlying content store from Google Docs so files that had already been uploaded would still exist in the same place and third-party tools wouldn’t break.

Google did exactly that. Tools—including Spanning Backup—that work with Google Docs “just work” with Google Drive. Good on Google.

2. Simple desktop-cloud-mobile sync that “just works” ✓
Sync is hard, but Dropbox sync is so seamless that users rarely notice it. Google needed to nail this one, and it looks like they did.

We’ve tested Google Drive for Mac extensively, and its sync has been silky smooth. As soon as the iOS app is available, I’ll be using that extensively as well.

3. Google+ integration for consumers, Google Apps integration for business users ✓
Typically new features from Google don’t reach Google Apps users until a few weeks after their introduction to consumers, but this time was different. Apps users are able to use Google Drive and admins can even purchase additional storage for their domains to share.

Google+ integration is fairly basic right now, but you can already share Google Drive photos with your Google+ circles. Tighter integration with both Google+ and Gmail is expected soon.

4. More free storage and cheap additional storage ✓
5GB free and additional storage that’s way cheaper than Dropbox. What’s not to love?

Well, additional storage for Google Drive may undercut Dropbox’s pricing, but it’s a significant step up from what Google’s previous price list. Compare the “old” prices for additional Google Docs storage to the “new” prices for Google Drive:

The good news is if you purchased additional storage before Google Drive launched, the price you paid is grandfathered in—as long as you don’t change anything. See this Google knowledge base item for a detailed discussion of old vs. new storage plans, pricing, and policies.

OK, so Google is four-for-four so far. What’s the thing they missed?

1. Picasa, Google+ Photos, and Google Music integration ✗

Even though you can share photos from your Google Drive via Google+, there’s still a strange disconnect between Drive and Google’s app-specific storage lockers, including those for Picasa and Google Music.

Maybe integration is coming, with folders within Google Drive for Picasa and Music. Or maybe Google is waiting for Darwinian forces to play out, leaving Drive the victor. Regardless, the lack of integration leaves users with somewhat of a disjointed experience.

Google has said that more features are coming to Google Drive, and we’re eager to see them. In the mean time, what’s in your Google Drive? Get a visual report of your Google Drive usage with our latest free tool, Spanning Stats for Google Drive, available for both individual users and Google Apps admins.

What’s in Your Google Drive? Find Out with Spanning Stats for Google Drive

Two days ago Google launched Google Drive. Yesterday we saw the volume of files uploaded to Google Drive (née Google Docs) increase by a factor of 10. People are uploading a bunch of stuff—but what? What’s in your Google Drive?

As it turns out, that’s a tough question to answer. Well, it was until just now.

Spanning Stats for Google Drive is now available, and it’s free. To get a customized visual report of exactly how you’re using Google Drive (like the one shown here) just visit freetools.spanning.com/#stats and click “Sign In”. Or if you’re a Google Apps domain administrator, click “Add to Google Apps” and you’ll be able to see a report for your whole domain and each user in it.

Either way, you’ll see a complete report showing:

• percentage of docs in your Google Drive by type
• top 10 newest and oldest files
• percentage of your files were created and viewed in the last month and year
• volume of documents created per week over the last year
• volume of documents created by hour throughout the day
• how much quota you’re consuming by file type
• the 10 files consuming the most quota
• the 10 users consuming the most quota (domain admins only)
• size of files uploaded per week over the last year
• size of files uploaded by hour throughout the day

You can share your report privately or publicly, and can disable sharing at any time. You can view the domain-wide report for spanning.com here.

We invite you to check it out, run a report, and let us know how you’re using Google Drive.

How Google Drive Could Become a Huge Success, Redux

A hundred years ago—and by that I mean last December—I wrote a guest post on Mashable with my thoughts on how Google Drive could become a huge success. Since a launch is rumored to be imminent, I thought I’d revisit those suggestions so we can see how they play out:

Google Apps users are already using a “Google Drive”—keep it intact
The point here is that people already store lots of “non-native” files (e.g., Microsoft Office docs, PDF’s, videos, music, etc) in Google Docs, and there are lots of third-party products that integrate with Google Docs as a place to store these files. Google needs to make sure that nothing fundamental changes with the way all that works. Otherwise, they’re going to have lots of unhappy users.

Simple desktop-cloud-mobile sync that “just works”
I’m a huge Dropbox fan, but I never ever use its web interface. I just copy files in and out of my Dropbox folder on my Mac, as do the people I share files with. It just works. And when I open the Dropbox app on my iPhone or iPad, all my stuff is just there. If Google wants to win in this space, their sync stuff better work just as well. All that stands between success and failure here is a few HTTP 500 errors.

Google+ integration for consumers, Google Apps integration for business users
This is a tricky one, but one I think Google needs to get right. Google’s consumer world is all about Google+ these days, and I’d be surprised if they released Google Drive without some sort of awesome integration into it—sharing files with your circles, for instance. But at the same time, business users of Google Apps need to share files within their organizations, with access control lists that are aware of Apps groups (e.g., Sales or Marketing).

The complexity here goes toward a larger problem Google is facing: how to unify how consumers and business customers manage groups of contacts. I’m not sure Google will have the Right Solution in place in time for the release of Google Drive, but it sure would help ease adoption.

Picasa, Google+ Photos, and Google Music integration
I use Dropbox to share not only work documents, but also music and photos. For the same seamless experience, Google needs to integrate the sharing functions of their own music and photo applications into Google Drive. Otherwise, it’s going to be a mess trying to figure out how to share what. I expect Google to get this right, and for it to be a big shot in the arm for Google+ Photos and Google Music. (But don’t make me sync my whole Google Music library to my laptop—that’s what the cloud is for!)

More free storage and cheap additional storage
All of these features aside, there’s one thing on everyone’s mind: cost. Dropbox includes 2GB for free. Google Drive is rumored to include 5GB, which would be enough to be compelling. But Google has an opportunity to absolutely cream Dropbox on pricing for extra storage. $100 buys you 50GB on Dropbox or 400GB on Google Docs—8x as much storage for the same price. $200 buys you 100GB on Dropbox, while $256 you can get a full terabyte from Google. If Google leaves their prices for additional storage unchanged, they’ll undercut Dropbox almost by a factor of ten. Game over.

(Google also needs to let Apps users upgrade to higher storage tiers, which we can’t do today.)

So there are my recommendations. If and when Google releases Drive, we’ll see how many of them they followed. And you can be sure that Spanning will be releasing tools that make Google Drive even better. Stay tuned.