Improved Status Updates: Spanning Backup for Google Workspace

Google Workspace Backup You Can Trust

One of the things that really sets Spanning apart is the transparency and detailed status reporting that we provide. When you log in to Spanning Backup for Google Workspace and click on the Status tab, you’re taken to a page that provides an in-depth status overview of the backups for your domain by day as well as by user. The green dots mean that there are no problems, the grey dots mean that nothing was backed up, and the yellow dots indicate that there was some kind of problem during the backup.

Spanning Backup for Google Workspace is the only solution that will notify you of these problems. We do it because you trust us with your data, and we need to continue to earn your trust by being transparent with your data.

For the yellow dots, we’ve provided you with a bit more information on how to resolve any backup problems and turn yellow back to green. There are 3 kinds of problems.

Attention Needed means that there’s some sort of action needed by the administrator or end user to resolve the problem. For example, if you have a 0 byte file that got corrupted by a bad sync, you may need to go in and manually resync that file by deleting it and then adding it back in to your local Google Drive folder.

Temporary Errors are technical glitches that usually work themselves out within a couple of days. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on these and make sure that they don’t linger too long, but a quick check should be all it takes.

Cannot Back Up means that due to limitations with Google’s API, there are certain file types that cannot be backed up by any backup providers, like script files, forms, and some third-party files, etc. Since we don’t have access to those files from Google, we want to be fully transparent about what is backed up.

If you only want to focus on items that need your attention, you can check Attention Needed, which will then become your default view the next time you log in. You can click on the yellow dot for your whole domain to see all of the problems in a list format or choose to view them by each user. Once you get to your list of errors, you can click on each one to get more information about what went wrong and what the next steps are. If there’s a large list, you can always download a CSV spreadsheet of all problems.

Also, the status update emails you get from Spanning Backup either daily, weekly or monthly have been improved to show you more of this information at a glance.

Backup errors can lead to problems restoring a file when you need it, and that’s why we want to make it as clear as possible what the problem is and what can be done about it so that problems can be proactively resolved instead of ignored. You were smart enough to protect your Google Workspace data with Spanning Backup, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure your backups run smoothly and that any problems are easily identifiable and resolvable.