Most popular clouds app offer backups of your data, but they are often limited in their scope & functionality:
- Their trash or bin system only keeps deleted records for a short amount of time. After this period – usually 25 or 30 days – the records are permanently deleted from your account.
- Their export functionality does not allow you to export metadata such as comments, views, formulas, project templates or automations.
By using Pro Backup you get more control over the data types that you can backup & restore. Below we will describe 3 key reasons that show you why having a redundant & independent backup of your cloud data is essential.
Permanent deletion of business-critical data
The most obvious risk is the unwanted deletion of important business data. There are 3 mains scenarios where this can happen.
a) Human error
It happens to the best of us: You think that you’re working in a test environment and you want to clean up some records. Before you know it, you actually deleted a selection of your most promising leads.
Another common mistake is that you want to restore one record but instead you end up deleting the whole sheet or app. Depending on the cloud app, this can be hard to recover from.
b) Disgruntled employees
As it is easy to delete data permanently from your account, a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage very quickly. Especially in smaller team, the roles & authorisations are often managed in a loose way. Sometimes even freelancers get powerful admin rights and thus the option to permanently delete your data.
It’s also important to mention that this scenario has a broad spectrum: This does not only happen in the dramatic scenario where an employee leaves the company with slamming doors; it can often be very subtle. We’ve heard stories of employees secretly deleting a part of the incoming leads because fewer leads meant fewer work: When you delete a lead, you no longer need to call them and you don’t have to follow them up.
Using cloud apps to manage the work of your team therefore creates a dangerous incentive for your team to delete data: If you delete a to do, you can pretend that it was never created and you have less work to do. Or if you missed the deadline of a todo, deleting it might give you an excuse for not delivering it.
In some cases the employer will not even know what “work” has been deleted by his team. There is often no warning system and most cloud apps don’t even track which user has deleted the record, so both parties can blame each other.
c) Cyber Attacks
The last scenario is the most difficult to grasp: Not only does it cover a wide arrange of scenarios, but good reporting on cyber attacks is hard to find: Companies often don’t know they have been hacked or have a clear incentive not to make it public.
Corrupted data
A second risk is not deleting important data, but corrupting it instead. There are 2 mains scenarios where this can happen:
- CSV imports gone wrong
- 3rd party apps
If data has been corrupted or if you just want to double check the previous versions of a certain app, project or template, you can re-create the correct data set with the Rollback functionality.
Your cloud app is temporarily offline
If you have critical data stored in a cloud app it may damage your business badly if this app is for some reason not accessible.
For these cases you could access your data both via our Snapshot feature and by accessing it through Google Drive.