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IndustryA New Way to Recover Deleted Google Calendar Events: What It Is, and What It Isn’t
Google recently announced a new way to recover deleted Calendar events. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about what this functionality can do, what it can’t do, and what you should do to protect your Google Calendar data (in addition to using Google’s new functionality.)
By
Lori Witzel
3 minute read
Google recently announced a new way to recover deleted Calendar events. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about what this functionality can do, what it can’t do, and what you should do to protect your Google Calendar data (in addition to using Google’s new functionality.)For Google admins, the new Trash functionality for Google Calendars could be helpful in reducing the number of escalations. When an end user accidentally deletes a Calendar event, the event will now be put into Google Trash, and that makes it much easier for an end user to restore deleted events without needing to ask for help from an admin.
But before the admins reading this start celebrating, here’s a slightly deeper dive into what it can, and can’t, do. We’ll use Spanning Backup for Google Workspace for comparison.
| Functionality | Google Calendar + New Trash Functionality | Spanning Backup for Google Workspace |
|---|
| View, permanently delete, or restore individual and recurring deleted Calendar events in Trash <30 days. | Yes | Yes |
| Enable restore of permanently deleted events. | No | Yes |
| Enable restore of events left in Trash for >30 days. | No | Yes |
| Recover events even when those who are not the primary Calendar owner permanently delete them. | No | Yes |
| Enable admins to perform cross-user-restores – for example, when a departing employee deleted their Calendar events, and those events need to be restored to their manager’s Calendar. | No | Yes |
While the new functionality is helpful, it won’t solve for common calendar deletion scenarios such as:
- Malicious intent. An administrative assistant is angry at their employer and decides to quit – and just before they do, they delete every recurring meeting plus the next two month’s worth of meetings, and then they empty the Trash. This means almost EVERY Calendar within the organization is affected.
- Accidental deletions due to Trash aging out. A Google Workspace admin is rationalizing their domain and deletes a shared Calendar no longer thought to be in use. A little more than a month later, an end user asks where the Calendar went – it was used for a past project, and they wanted to use the event timings for milestone timings on an upcoming project. Now it’s gone, and the end user must recreate project milestone timings without it.
- Sync errors. If you’ve synced Google Calendars with other applications, such as Salesforce, a bad sync can wipe out critical Calendar events without the error being immediately obvious to the end user. If they then decide to “tidy up” by deleting their Trash that week, they may cause organization-wide Calendar deletions.
Further, relying upon this new feature for your safety net keeps the scope of data protection within Google, rather than with a third party, is not a best practice. In short, while this new capability in Google Calendars is useful, it isn’t enough to enable a fast, accurate restore across common use cases for business continuity. And fast, accurate restores are the data protection gold standard, as noted in Cobit5, Manage Continuity, DSS04.
What would provide a Google Calendar backup and restore that could satisfy those requirements? Spanning Backup for Google Workspace is one such solution. With automated daily backups of your Google Calendars and on-demand backups at any time, Spanning Backup for Google Workspace makes sure your Calendars and their events are never lost – even if someone accidentally or maliciously deletes them.
3-Step Guide to Protecting Data in Google Workspace