Startup Accidentally Deletes G Suite Data, Sues Google
In a stark reminder of the importance of data backup, an interior design tools startup has sued Google in an effort to restore data after an employee accidentally deleted the company’s G Suite account.
According to the lawsuit, the company contacted Google within an hour of the incident in an effort to explain the situation and asked for the account to be restored. Google support allegedly did not escalate the case for nearly 3 days, after which attempts to retrieve the data were unsuccessful. The company had no access to data and emails for over a month and claims to have lost contact with clients and users as a result. The startup further claims the loss of 3 years’ worth of data, including user feedback studies, UX/UI designs, demos, videos, algorithm evaluations, and more.
While the litigation is ongoing, Google’s support page specifies steps that G Suite administrators can take to recover “permanently deleted” data within 25 days of removal. Whether these steps were attempted by the company in question, and whether they apply if an entire account has been deleted, is unknown.
This predicament underlines the importance of maintaining backups of all company data, including data stored online. Companies today rely on their data to function, especially video and animation studios where everything from source footage to final product are often entirely digital. Being unable to access company data, even for a brief period, presents a major threat to continued operation.
To address the issue of preserving online data, Nodal has partnered with Spanning, a service that provides backup solutions for G Suite. Spanning Backup for G Suite could have mitigated this disaster had backups been made and maintained prior to the account’s deletion.
According to Spanning support:
“In the event that an entire G Suite domain is deleted, and as such, all user accounts and all users’ data is also deleted, Spanning Backup for G Suite can help recover all of your G Suite data and turn this data disaster into a non-event.”
In a nutshell, recovering from this sort of disaster would require the company to re-create their G Suite domain and all individual user accounts that were deleted. Then Spanning would be able to run restores to the re-created accounts.
In such a scenario production downtime is a major factor for the affected company. Spanning is designed to mitigate account downtime by restoring data in parallel, which greatly helps increase Spanning’s restore speed, as multiple objects can be restored at the same time. Additionally, the admin user can run restores of multiple users at once, so they can simply initiate the restores of all affected users, and the data for these users will all be restored concurrently. This will enable the domain to get back to working order quickly and easily.”
To find out more about Spanning’s features and services, check out their product page. For more information on data backup and disaster recovery best practices, feel free to contact Nodal!