Google has made getting things done easy, and at times it is almost impossible to imagine that there was a time when the world survived just fine without Google services. Google has created and offered a number of services with Gmail being one of its most successful products. After the grand success of Gmail, Google went ahead and released Google Apps.

As it turns out, Google Apps are once again one of the brightest ideas Google has come up with. Google apps offer a tools suite that can be used by people for personal use or companies for corporate use. These apps cover just about everything from calendars, to emails and even documents. Numerous companies use Google Apps, especially the small and medium sized companies for which these apps are much needed.

Even with the success of the Google Apps, Google Apps are created by humans and hence susceptible to failure at some point. It is therefore important to back up your Google apps just in case something happens that can cause loss of apps and data.

Google apps backup – Why it is important to create a backup

According to statistics, at least 44% of all data losses are as a result of hard drive failures. Of course, Google comes with a hardware redundancy that is extraordinary and all data is stored in varying data centers. Data can also be lost due to software errors caused by malware programs or corruption of software. Also, user errors are a common cause of data loss. Even though it is not common, it is possible to cancel your Google apps account and as a result lose everything you had saved. To ensure you do not lose your data, creating a Google apps backup is the best course of action to take.

Google apps backup – the step by step guide

The most used and probably smartest backup solution is the creation of a local copy of all important data. You can use helpful tools such as IMAP protocol to back up your inbox. This way, you will not lose your emails in case of any data loss. This can be done by installing Thunderbird to Outlook on the PC and then setting up IMAP access in the Gmail settings.

For your Google docs, you need to ensure that your documents are all available offline, in a dropbox folder preferably. You can download dropbox to your desktop which will create a copy on the hard drive and a copy for the server.

You can also use cloud storage for your Google apps. These cloud backup systems will restore your apps after a crash.