Backupify launches one-click restore for cloud apps

Backupify -- the company that launched the cloud backup service for your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Gmail accounts -- is taking its popular service to the next stage. On Tuesday, the company announced the availability of its new one-click restore feature for cloud apps. Specifically, the first cloud app that Backupify can restore is the Google Apps suite, but the company plans to extend the feature to additional SaaS apps in the future.

The new restore feature for Google Apps was developed in partnership with Google and using the restore elements built into Google's API. The one-click restore option is now a standard part of the Backupify product and does not cost anything extra for Backupify customers, who pay based on number of users and the amount of data. One-click restore is available for all of the apps in the Google Apps suite, except for Google Sites, which already has its own versioning and restore system.

Backupify says:

"Google Apps backups occur automatically every 24 hours and Google Apps users or their IT administrators can access their archives at any time through any web browser, download information to their local PC, to their data center or use One-Click Restore to reinsert them directly to their Google Apps accounts."

Previously, Backupify only saved an offline copy of data from about 10 different cloud services -- about half of which were Google services -- and if a user wanted to restore something then they had to do it manually (typically with a cut-and-paste). Backupify plans to not only support existing Google Apps, but also has the infrastructure in place to support future additions to the suite. And, Backupify CEO Rob May expects Google to aggressively expand Google Apps in the future.

He said, "Most anything they think will serve a business function, they'll roll into Apps. Google Voice will be part of Google Apps, [for example]."

There are over three million organizations using Google Apps and many of them have to worry about regulatory compliance. For them, Backupify is an attractive solution because it's a backup handled by a third-party that is separate from Google, and that separation is a common guideline of many regulations (as well as being a general best practice for data management).

"The whole Google ecosystem has started to embrace what we're doing," said May. Beyond Google itself, that includes resellers, service providers, and systems integrators, who all resell Google Apps to businesses. Backupify has developed its own reseller program to plug into this infrastructure.

Backupify has also made its product friendly for IT departments. For example, with the new restore feature, users can restore their Google Apps data themselves or IT can do it for them on an individual user basis. "The IT administrator can now control the entire installation," said May.

This is critical since Google is trying to move up the food chain with its online office suite. May stated, "They're really trying to push Google Apps to larger and larger enterprises."

To help satisfy IT departments and larger companies with more sensitive data, Backupify rolled out 256-bit AES encryption during 2010.

When I first wrote about Backupify about a year ago, the company had 30,000 users. Today, the company has about 125,000 users on board, as well as 1 billion emails and 70 terabytes of data under management, and it's growing by a terabyte a week.

Look for the company to expand its cloud backup to other SaaS apps during 2011. May said that Backupify would start backing up Salesforce.com by the end of the second quarter. The company is currently in talks with Salesforce and whether or not Backupify will be able to launch one-click restore for Salesforce will depend on the level of integration that it can work out with the company, according to May.

However, May is confident that Backupify has the technology infrastructure in place -- it runs on a mix of Ruby, PostgreSQL, and Cassandra -- to scale and handle a lot more users and a lot more apps. That infrastructure is now more than just a data archive. It's an actionable, restorable copy of Google Apps data, with restore on the way for more cloud apps in the future.

This article was originally published on TechRepublic.