Are you backing up your Google Docs? If not, it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to the cloud. For customers of the enterprise and education versions of the document software as a service, LTech’s new tool lets administrators do comprehensive or selective backups.
There have been options before to backup your Docs, but LTech seems to be the first official enterprise partner of Google to offer such a software package. Currently there’s a single user demo available for free, with an enterprise license for the domain version (of Apps).
LTech has been an enterprise partner of Google for quite some time, 2001 to be exact. Their flagship products have focused on Google Apps specifically, providing management and single sign on capabilities.
Older options for backing up your Google Docs were fairly hit and miss. For personal backups, there have been utilities available on Google Code, or a Greasemonkey script for Firefox users. But neither of these are well-suited to heavy use by enterprises.
The Google Docs Backup from LTech currently only works in Windows, which is natural for an enterprise tool. However, in a phone call with LTech, it became clear that OSX and perhaps even Linux compatibility is in their roadmap. The Google Docs API (and others) that are the primary driver for the tool are not actually tied to a Windows architecture of course.
In terms of usability, the backup system is pretty simple. The default mode to interact with your Docs is through a GUI, but there is support for working from the command line. Authentication with both your admin credentials and OAuth key are required. Once you’re in, you can backup Docs to your local drive either in bulk or filtered by folder. Output file types include, but aren’t limited to, Microsoft Office, PDF, rich text and HTML. Once you’re done, there’s a plain text report issued that keeps track of all your stats.
The system automatically separates out users in to their own folders, and you can do basically whatever you want with the files once they’ve been synced to your machine. Primary motivators for those with an enterprise license are related to sharing with those without Docs access and for compliance. For those purposes, LTech’s tools is a solid choice.
