Why It’s Important to Back Up Not Only Docs But Also Folders

Imagine buying a backup program for your PC and using it diligently every day. Now imagine that one day your hard drive crashes. “Good thing I’ve been making backups every day,” you say to yourself as you restore your files from your backup. But your horror, instead of being restored along with their the original folder structure, all of your files are restored directly onto your Desktop in a disorganized mess. You spend the next few days—or weeks—recreating your folders by hand and figuring out which file goes where.

Folders in Google Docs

The moral of this story is that your backup system needs to back up not only your data (documents, spreadsheets, email, etc.) but also your metadata, which is data about your data, like the folders into which you’ve organized your documents.

Unlike our competition, Spanning Backup retains not only each of your Google Apps documents, but also information about the folders (collections) to which each document belongs and the hierarchical structure of those folders. And while this may sound esoteric, it turns out to be critically important.

Our company uses Google Docs for just about everything, including HR information. Documents are organized into folders for each employee, and further into folders for each department. Each employee folder contains some standard documents: Resume.pdf, Signed Offer Letter.pdf, etc.

Folders in Spanning Backup

If our backup system didn’t retain the folder structure of our documents, it would be losing important data every day. We’d be left with a jumble of documents all with the same title, and if we ever needed to restore all of them at once, we’d be left to sort them out manually.

With any nontrivial number of documents, this could be a nightmare. But Spanning Backup retains metadata and understands how to use it during the restore process, so documents are backed up and restored¹ with their folder structure intact.

Again, this may sound like an obvious approach but it turns out to be a competitive differentiator for us.

¹ As always, all Spanning Backup restores are non-destructive.