Gmail

Gmail in Google Workspace is a collaborative email solution for organizations, offering integrated business tools, security, and administrative controls to support modern enterprise communication. Cloud Protection Service enables you to protect user data in your Gmail environment.

Considerations

Before you register your Gmail instance or perform backup or recovery operations, you must review the following considerations.

Protection Group And Policy

Selected items for backup are organized into a single entity known as a Protection Group. This approach simplifies backup management because policies that control the backup schedule, retention period, and related parameters can be assigned directly to specific Protection Groups.

Restore operations are also streamlined. You can initiate a restore for all items within a Protection Group at once. Each item can belong to only one Protection Group at a time. This ensures clear and consistent policy enforcement. You can assign an existing policy or create a new policy as needed.

Supported Backup Types

  • Full backup
  • Incremental backup

You can select the backup type when running a backup (for example, Run now). Backup type cannot be configured in policy.

Supported Items for Backup and Recovery

  • User mailbox
  • Mailbox items
  • Labels

Labels

The following labels are supported for backup and recovery:

  • Starred
  • Drafts
  • Spam
  • Trash
  • Custom labels
  • Category labels, for example Social and Important.

The following label related items are not supported:

  • Snoozed label due to Google API limitations
  • Muted status
  • Scheduled mail

Label Recovery Behavior:

  • If a label already exists in the destination mailbox, recovered emails are added under that label.
  • If a label does not exist in the destination mailbox, Cloud Protection Service creates the label and then adds the recovered emails under it.
  • When restoring to an alternate location, you must define a root label.

Unsupported Items for Backup and Recovery

  • Mailbox settings
  • Filters and rules
  • Contacts
  • Calendars
  • Chat

Backup Use Cases

The typical use cases such as backup of all mailboxes, individual user mailboxes, or specific items from a user’s mailbox are supported.

All About Recovery

After a backup completes successfully, you can recover backed up items in case of data loss or corruption.

  • The destination mailbox must already exist. A new mailbox cannot be created as part of the recovery workflow.
  • Bulk recovery of all Gmail mailboxes is supported.
  • Granular recovery of an individual mailbox, multiple mailboxes, or mailbox items is supported.
  • Selecting a recovery point is supported.

Recovery Destinations:

  • Original Location: Recover to the same mailbox from which the mailbox or mailbox items were backed up.
  • New Location: Recover to a different mailbox within the same registered Google Workspace source or a different registered Google Workspace source.

Root Label Behavior for Alternate Locations

When restoring to an alternate mailbox or location, specify a root label. Cloud Protection Service prefixes Recoverd labels with the root label followed by the original mailbox email address. If the root label is blank, the prefix defaults to the original mailbox email address.

Example 1: Root Label Specified

  • Root label: Recoverd Mail
  • Original mailbox email: alice@company.com

Resulting label prefix examples:

  • Recoverd Mail/alice@company.com/Inbox
  • Recoverd Mail/alice@company.com/Sent
  • Recoverd Mail/alice@company.com/CustomLabel

Example 2: Root Label Omitted Or Left Blank

  • Root label: blank
  • Original mailbox email: alice@company.com

Resulting label prefix examples:

  • alice@company.com/Inbox
  • alice@company.com/Sent
  • alice@company.com/CustomLabel

Additional Recovery Capabilities:

  • Downloading individual items is not supported.
  • Overwriting an existing mailbox or mailbox item at the destination location is supported.