Skip to main content

Backing up with an unlimited Google Drive account.

It occurred to me when the unlimited Google Drive accounts for Education were announced a while back that I could use a 'backup' account to cloud backup my local server infrastructure. So I've just set this up now that we have unlimited accounts. Below are the basic steps I've taken.

  • Create an account specifically for backups - call it whatever you want.
  • Install the Google Drive Sync Tool on a local server (one that you perhaps use for backups anyways).
  • Sign into the Sync Tool with the backup users account.
  • Go to advanced settings:


  • Select 'Only sync some folders on the computer' - so you are only going to sync folders with things you want to backup. You could create a specific Google Drive folder and turn this into a network share so that other servers can copy backups into it (which is what I've done).
  • On other servers - if you run Windows Server Backup - you could send the backup to this network share. This will mean backups as synced to the cloud as they appear.
  • Leave a 'backup user' logged onto the server in question - otherwise the sync tool won't run.
  • You could also copy backup files that other servers make to this share via a scheduled task - see example below:

So I have a server that runs an SQL database and backs it up once a day. The backups are stored on the D drive of this server. I've set a scheduled task to run the following batch file at 1.00am every day:


This takes the entire contents of the folder that contains the backups and puts in into a network share that also happens to be the Google Drive folder of my backup user. The /MIR switch simple means it will mirror the contents of the original folder. Once run, the Google Drive sync tool pushes the updates to the users drive as a new version of the file.

So far this all seems to work fine - happens overnight in conjunction with our local backups and means we have another location for backups to live. We will see how it goes in the coming months.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delete a specific email using GAM

If a user send an inappropriate email to a loads of people or get stung by some sort of email exploit you can quickly delete the email from all of the recipients using a GAM command.
Step 1 - get the email header Go into Google Vault and search for the offending user or someone known to have got the message.
Click show details and grab the email ID. This will be a long string of characters followed by @mail.gmail.com
Step 2 - find out who has the email Go into Google Vault and find the original message sent by the offending user. Look at the details to see who got it. Copy the list and dump it into a spreadsheet. Clean up to just a list of emails with a column header 'mail'. Save as a csv file.
Step 3 - delete messages with GAM Put your CSV file in your GAM folder - this e.g. assumes its called mail.csv
Run:
gam csv mail.csv gam user ~mail delete messages query rfc822msgid:MESSAGEIDHERE doit

 The alternative nuke option is:
gam all users delete messages query rfc822msgid:MESSAGEI…
Read more

How to push bookmarks to users in Chrome via the management console

With the release of Chrome and ChomeOS 37 an update to the management console has arrived that allows you to push bookmarks to users.

Under Device Management > Chrome > User Settings > User Experience you will now find the option to add managed bookmarks.


In the example above, the bookmarks are applied to the sub-OU of 'students' - so all our students will get these bookmarks. Simply add your url and the bookmark name, click the + and save. These will appear in a folder called 'yourdomain bookmarks' - see below:



Be aware that to get these bookmarks applied on a Windows/OS-X device the user must be signed into Chrome. Update: if you install the latest group policy template you can push the bookmarks via policy on PCs - details are given here.
Video Guide:

Read more

How to do vertical text in Google Spreadsheet

After many years of waiting, this is now a feature of sheets - so this little hack is no longer needed. Options now are:


One limitation of Google Spreadsheets is the lack of a vertical text option - handy if you have very wordy headings to columns. This is being worked on - but a little work around for now is the use of the following formula:

=ARRAYFORMULA(CONCATENATE((MID( "English Lit"; ROW(INDIRECT("YY1:YY"&LEN( "English Lit" ))); 1)&CHAR(10))))

Don't worry how it works - just copy and paste - change both english lit's to whatever you want.
Read more