Active Backup for G Suite admin console
The centralized admin console allows IT admins to create backup tasks for G Suite accounts as well as Team Drives and monitor the backup status from a single interface.
Create backup tasks
To create a backup task:
- Click Create to start the wizard from Task List.
- Enter the Domain for backup as well as Domain administrator email address and upload a Service key to authenticate the account domain.
- Enter your Task name, choose a shared folder from the Destination Shared Folder drop-down, select users and their services as well as Team Drives to be backed up from Edit, and if needed, enable Account discovery for My Drive, Team Drive, mail, contacts, and calendar services, and Active Backup for G Suite Portal.
- Account discovery: newly-created accounts with their mail, contacts, calendar, or drive services enabled or Team Drive enabled in G Suite will be automatically selected to be backed up.
- Active Backup for G Suite Portal: IT admins can control whether to give users access to run restore tasks by themselves.
- Configure your backup and retention policies:
- Backup policy
- Continuous backup: data will be backed up continuously in an infinite cycle.
- Manual backup: users' data will be backed up immediately once the backup function is manually enabled.
- Scheduled backup: users' data will be backed up every day based on the schedule you set.
- File version retention policy
- Preserve all versions: all file versions will be preserved.
- Number of days for historical file versions to be preserved: when a backed up file is updated to a new version, the previous version will be preserved for the period of time you set for file retention.
- Check your task summary and click Apply to finish creating your backup task.
Note:
- Active Backup for G Suite supports backing up multiple domains. However, please note that the Domain for backup required for authorization on the task creation page has to be either a primary or a secondary domain. Alias domains are not supported.
- When entering Domain administrator email address on the task creation page, this administrator's role has to be Super Admin, Groups Admin, User Management Admin,or Help Desk Admin. If the role is one of the last two types, please make sure that this administrator account is the member of the organization.
- The services and users which can be backed up in the task will be based on both the entered domain and the administrator's privilege.
Manage backup tasks
In the Task list tab, you can see a list of all backup tasks that have been created. You can also manage them with the buttons at the top of the tab.
To manage a backup task:
- Select the backup task you want to edit and click Edit.
- On the General tab, you can
- Modify the task name
- Enable and disable Account discovery for each service and Team Drive as well as Active Backup for G Suite Portal
- On the Version tab, you can configure backup and retention policies.
To manage users' services to be backed up:
- Select a backup task and click Edit > User.
- If you have enabled Account discovery for any of the four services, all new users added to the domain with that service will be automatically backed up. You can include or exclude specific users by manually selecting or deselecting them.
To manage Team Drives to be backed up:
- Select a backup task and click Edit > Team Drive.
- If you have enabled Account discovery for Team Drive, all new Team Drives added to the domain will be automatically backed up. You can include or exclude specific Team Drives by manually selecting or deselecting them.
To delete backed up user data:
- Select a backup task, click Edit, and go to the User tab.
- Select a user and click Storage management to delete user's backup data for any of the four services. Your service will be deselected for backup once your backup data is deleted.
To delete backed up Team Drive data:
- Select a backup task, click Edit, and go to the Team Drive tab.
- Select a Team Drive and click Storage management to delete its backup data. Your service will be deselected for backup once your backup data is deleted.
View task information
Overview
In the Overview tab, you can monitor the following information from a single interface.
- Protected service: the number of users protected in each service.
- Backup summary: the summary of all backup activities in the past 35 days, including the backup status and number of backup activities for each day. When clicking on the icon of each day, you can check the log for that day. Below are all the icons you might see and their corresponding meanings:
- No backup history
- Upcoming backup
- Success
- Warning
- Error
- Activities: current backup and restoration activities. When clicking on the arrow icon in the top right hand corner, you will be redirected to the Activities tab.
- Log: the most recent logs. When clicking on the arrow icon in the top right hand corner, you will be redirected to the Log tab to view more logs.
- Service usage: total storage space consumed by each service.
- User/Drive usage: the amount of storage space consumed by users or Team Drives who have used the most capacity.
- Transferred size: the transferred size of each task displayed by Day/Hour.
Note:
- Regarding the category, Backup summary, there are three types of status, Error, Warning, and Successful. The status for a day will be displayed as Error/Warning as long as any single activity in that day shows error/warning, while the status will only be shown as Successful if all task results of that day are success.
Task List
In the Task List tab, you can see a list of all backup tasks that have been created. In the menu of each backup task, you will find the following information for the task, whether it is being executed or has been fully executed.
- Tasks that are being executed: the current number of protected users in each service and Team Drive backup status.
- Tasks that have been fully executed: the backup result, last backup time, and the number of protected users in each service and Team Drive, and their backup status.
Below are all the icons you might see in the menu of each backup task and their corresponding meanings:
- Success
- Warning
- Error
- No user selected for backup
- Preparing for backup
- Ready for backup
Note:
Regarding the definition of each task status, below you can find detailed information:
- Error: If the data of a task fails to be backed up, the task status will be shown as Error.
- Warning: If the data of a task is successfully backed up, but the corresponding metadata fails to go through the execution, the task status will be shown as Warning (only applicable to Drive tasks).
- Successful: If both the data and metadata of a task are successfully backed up, the task status will be shown as Successful.
Activities
- Admins can easily monitor current backup and restoration activities on the Activities tab.
- Backup: the backup policy, elapsed time, and backup progress of each running backup task.
- Restoration: the elapsed time and restoration progress of each running restoration task as well as the users who executed them.
- Admins can also click on Cancel to stop a running activity. Please note that a task where the continuous backup policy is applied comes with an infinite backup cycle. Therefore, users cannot cancel such tasks directly using the Cancel button.
Log
The Log allows you to keep track of the backup tasks that have been performed. You can view the log in its entirety or use filters to search for certain tasks.
To search through log records with a specific filter:
- Go to Log.
- Click the arrow in the search bar on the top right hand corner.
- In the drop-down menu, you can filter events by:
- Keyword: enter the keyword you wish to search for.
- Type: select the type of log you want to view in the drop-down menu.
- Date: enter a start and end date to find logs created within a specific period of time.
- Click the button on the right end side to view the detailed logs for the event.
- To reset your filter, click the Reset button and start searching again.
To view log details:
- Select a log and click the arrow icon on the right end of the entry to view detailed logs for an event.
- For backup activities, you can view the following information in the pop-up window:
- Status: the duration, used space, and status of each backup user and Team Drive.
- File Log: the backup account, item, size, time, and status of each task.
- Mail, Contacts, and Calendar: the type, backup time, and detailed log of each backup activity.
- For restoration activities, you can view the following information in the pop-up window:
- File Log: the source and destination account, item, size, time, and status of each restoration task.
- Mail, Contacts, and Calendar: the type, restoration time, and detailed log of each restoration activity.
Detailed task information
To view the status and logs of a task:
- Select the backup task in the Task list tab and click on Details.
- In the Details window you can view the following information:
- Status: the duration, used space, and status of each backup user and Team Drive.
- File Log: the backup account, item, size, time, and status of each task.
- Mail, Contacts, and Calendar: the type, backup time, and detailed log of each backup activity.
Manage notification services
To enable noitification services:
To receive task-related notifications, go to DSM > Control Panel > Notification, and configure settings for your desired notification channel, i.e. SMS, email, or push service.
To manage events for notification:
To manage events for notification, go to DSM > Control Panel > Notification > Advanced, and configure settings for the events that you would like to be notified of.
Note:
- For more information on how to obtain authorization from Google for using Active Backup for G Suite, please refer to this tutorial.
- To allow specific users the access to Active Backup for G Suite Portal, go to Control Panel > Privileges, select Active Backup for G Suite Portal, and click on Edit to give permissions.
- Only users with admin privilege can cancel other users' restoration tasks from Active backup for G Suite Console.
- The Active Backup for G Suite Portal needs to be enabled in the Active Backup for G Suite package for users to restore data by themselves.
- Block-level deduplication is only supported on shared folders in Btrfs volumes, with the exception of encrypted shared folders; single instancing for mail and calendar attachments is only supported on shared folders in Btrfs volumes. For detailed information regarding support for the two features, please refer to the below table:
|
Single instancing |
Block-level deduplication |
Drive |
O |
O |
Mail |
Attachment only |
X |
Contacts |
X |
X |
Calendar |
Attachment only |
X |
- Files or folders will not be backed up or skipped by Active Backup for G Suite under the following circumstances:
- The file/folder name or path contains “#SynoVersionRepo”, “#SynoRepo”, or “#SynoVersions”.
- The file/folder path on DSM is longer than 4016 characters.
- The name of any file or folder in the destination shared folder exceeds 255 characters.
- The name of any file or folder in the encrypted destination shared folder exceeds 143 characters.
- The following online services are supported for backup: Google Apps Script, Google Docs, Google Drawings, Google Sheets, and Goolge Slides.
- The following file type are supported for content search:
- page/.key/.numbers
- .rtf
- Microsoft Office format (e.g. .docx/.doc, .pptx/.ppt, .xlsx/.xls)
- Text files (e.g. .cpp, .c, .txt)
- .epub
- .lit
- .mobi/.azw3/.pdb/.prc
- .pdf
- .rar
- .chm
- .slk/.gnumeric
- .eml/.msg
- .7z/.bz2/.gz/.zip/.tgz/.tbz/.tar
- The following variables are not support for content search:
- Stop words, regardless of case: "a", "an", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such", "that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these", "they", "this", "to", "was", "will", and "with".
- Symbols: for example, "@", "#", "*", "/", and "\".
- Punctuation marks: for example, "!", "?", and ":".
- Date such as Birthday and Anniversary in Contacts
- Emoji
- Synology Universal Search operators:
[X] and [Y]: Variables that may represent numbers, alphabetical letters, word segments, words, or phrases. |
Operator |
Example |
Description |
* |
[X]* |
- List matches that contain [X], and [X] is followed by zero to more random characters (represented as "*")
|
? |
?[X] [X]? |
- List matches that contain [X], and [X] is preceded or followed by one random character (represented as "?")
|
"" |
"[X][Y]" |
- List matches that contain exact, case-insensitive [X][Y]
|
&& |
[X] && [Y] |
- List matches that contain both [X] and [Y]
|
|| |
[X] || [Y] |
- List matches that contain [X], [Y], or both
- Matches that contain both [X] and [Y] will be listed on the top
|
+ |
+[X] |
- List matches that contain [X]
- Applicable to folders indexed at Preferences > File Indexing
|
- |
-[X] |
- List matches that do not contain [X]
- Applicable to folders indexed at Preferences > File Indexing
|
! |
![X] |
- List matches that do not contain [X]
- Applicable to folders indexed at Preferences > File Indexing
|
\ |
\[SpecialCharacter] |
- Special characters: + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \
- List matches that contain a targeted special character above
|