Google Workspace Backup for UK MSPs: What It Costs and What Google Doesn't Cover
Quick answer. Google Workspace does not back up your customers' data in the sense an MSP means it. Native retention covers accidental deletion for a limited window; it does not protect against a departing employee clearing a Shared Drive, ransomware syncing through Drive, or a mailbox someone needs to produce in evidence years after the account was closed. Third-party Google Workspace backup for UK MSPs typically costs £1–4 per user per month wholesale. BOBcloud charges £1.20 per user, covering Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Chat and Meet, with unlimited retention available and UK storage on Wasabi London from £20/TB. A base licence is also required.*
Disclosure. BOBcloud publishes this article and sells a white-label backup platform to MSPs with Google Workspace protection included. Our rate is below in full. We have described what Google's native tooling does from their own documentation rather than characterising it unfairly — the case for backup does not need exaggerating.
Most MSPs arrive at Google Workspace backup the same way: a client deletes something important, the client assumes Google has a copy, and the MSP discovers what Google's retention actually covers at the worst possible moment.
This is a practical guide to what Google protects, what it doesn't, what a third-party backup adds, and what it costs.
Does Google Workspace back up your data?
No, not in the way an MSP means the word.
Google operates a shared responsibility model. They guarantee the availability and durability of the service — your data will not be lost because a Google data centre fails. What happens to that data inside your customer's tenant remains your customer's responsibility, and by extension yours.
The native tooling is real, but it is designed for compliance and short-term recovery rather than restoration:
Trash holds deleted Gmail and Drive items for a limited period, then purges them permanently. Check the current window in Google's admin documentation — it is shorter than most clients assume.
Admin restore can recover a deleted user's data, but only within a short window after deletion, and only for users. It is not a mechanism for recovering arbitrary files, folders or individual messages.
Google Vault retains data for eDiscovery and legal hold. It is a compliance and search tool, not a restore tool — it exports data, it does not put it back where it was, and it does not preserve folder structure or sharing permissions. It also has to be configured before the event, not after.
None of that is Google failing at anything. It is simply not the same product as backup.
The Gmail problem MSPs underestimate
Drive gets the attention because file loss is visible. In practice, the calls that cause the most damage are about email — and they usually arrive long after anyone could have prevented the loss.
The closed mailbox, two years later. An employee leaves. The account is suspended, then deleted a few months on to stop paying for the licence. Two years later HMRC opens an enquiry, or a former employee brings a tribunal claim, and the correspondence that would settle it lived in that mailbox. UK businesses are generally expected to keep tax records for six years, and employment claims can surface well after someone has left. Google's admin restore window closed long before any of this started.
Selective deletion. Someone clears a thread, a folder, or a run of messages from a specific sender. Nobody notices, because nothing looks broken. Trash purges on schedule. There is no version history for a deleted email the way there is for a Drive file.
Mailbox rules that quietly delete. A misconfigured filter sends a class of incoming mail straight to Trash. The client discovers it weeks later when they realise they never received a run of invoices.
Compromised account clean-up. After a phishing compromise, attackers frequently delete the mail that would show what they did. Cleaning up the account does not bring it back.
The common thread is time. Every one of these is discovered after the native retention window has passed, which is precisely when a backup with real history is the only thing that helps.
What actually goes wrong in Drive
The departing employee. Someone leaves, and on the way out clears their Drive and a Shared Drive they had edit rights to. Discovered two months later, by which time Trash has long since purged.
Ransomware through Drive sync. A workstation gets encrypted, Drive for Desktop faithfully syncs the encrypted versions to the cloud, and the same happens on every other machine syncing that folder. The sync is working exactly as designed.
The retention policy that did its job. An admin sets a two-year Vault retention rule. Twenty-five months later, someone needs a contract from that period. The policy deleted it correctly.
Shared Drive deletion. A Shared Drive is removed by someone with manager rights. Admin restore covers users, not Shared Drives, and this is the case most third-party tools are weakest on too — worth checking specifically when you evaluate.
Retention: the setting that decides whether any of this helps
A backup that only keeps 30 or 90 days of history solves the Monday morning problems and none of the ones above. If the mailbox you need was deleted two years ago, a 90-day retention policy is no more useful than Trash.
We offer unlimited retention as an option. You set the policy per backup set — keep a rolling window if that suits the client, or keep everything indefinitely for those who need to be able to produce records years later.
The honest trade-off: unlimited retention on metered storage means the storage line grows over time, because you are keeping more data. That is the cost of being able to answer an HMRC enquiry about 2024 in 2030. It is worth setting expectations with clients about which of their users need long retention and which do not, rather than applying one policy to everyone and being surprised by the bill.
Some platforms bundle "unlimited" retention into a per-user rate. That can work out cheaper or more expensive depending on how much your clients hold — the question to ask is what happens to the price when the data grows, because it is being paid for either way.
What a proper Google Workspace backup covers
The baseline across the market is Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Calendar and Contacts. Some platforms stop short of Shared Drives, which is the gap worth checking first because it is where the collaborative work lives.
Our module covers Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Chat and Meet. You can choose all Shared Drive folders or select specific ones, and exclude deactivated Workspace users so you are not paying licences on people who have left.
There is also a lossless option for Google-native documents. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms are backed up preserving their original formatting and structure rather than converting them to Office formats and back — which is where fidelity is usually lost, particularly in Sheets with formulas and Forms with response logic.
Four things worth checking with any vendor, ours included:
- Are Shared Drives included, or extra?
- What is the maximum retention, and what does it cost to keep data for years rather than months?
- What happens to Google-native file fidelity on restore?
- Can you restore to a different user, for when the original account is gone?
That last one matters for the closed-mailbox scenario. If the only restore path is back into the original account, and that account no longer exists, the backup is not much help.
What Google Workspace backup costs
Wholesale rates for MSPs generally sit between roughly £1 and £4 per user per month. The spread comes from what is bundled: storage allowance, retention length, which workloads are covered, and minimum seat counts.
Ours is £1.20 per user per month, wholesale, all eight data types under one licence. Storage is billed separately on actual usage:
| Item | Price / month |
|---|---|
| Base licence, desktop or server * | see calculator |
| Google Workspace user licence | £1.20 |
| Storage — Wasabi London (UK) | £0.02/GB (£20 per TB) |
| Storage — Azure UK South | £0.06/GB (£60 per TB) |
| Storage — your own destination | no charge |
No minimum seat count, no minimum term, and restores are not metered.
A worked example
A customer with 40 Google Workspace users holding 300 GB across Gmail and Drive:
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1 base server licence * | see calculator |
| 40 users × £1.20 | £48.00 |
| 300 GB on Wasabi London × £0.02 | £6.00 |
| User and storage subtotal | £54.00 / month |
Add the base licence for the full figure. One server licence covers the whole Google domain however many users sit under it, so on a tenant this size it is a small fixed line rather than a per-head cost. What you charge retail is your decision — most MSPs we work with land between £3 and £5 per user.
You can model your own numbers on the cost calculator, or see every rate on the pricing page.
Where the data sits, and why UK MSPs ask
Storage is in the United Kingdom by default, on Wasabi's London region. Azure UK South is available if a customer contract names Microsoft specifically.
This matters more than it used to. UK GDPR does not prohibit international transfers, but it does require a lawful transfer mechanism and a documented assessment, and that is administrative work your customer has to do or you have to do for them. Data that never leaves the UK removes the question. For public sector, healthcare and education clients it is often a contractual requirement rather than a preference.
It also matters for the scenarios above. If you are producing mail in response to a legal claim or a tax enquiry, being able to say where it has been held for the last six years is part of the answer.
You can also point backups at your own S3-compatible storage, Backblaze B2, your own Azure tenancy, or a NAS in your own rack — in which case there is no storage charge from us at all and the residency question is entirely yours to answer.
Where we're not the right answer
You want Workspace backup inside a single-vendor stack. If backup arriving on the same invoice as your RMM and PSA matters more than pricing flexibility, a bundled platform suits you better than we do.
You need very high backup frequency. Some Workspace-specific tools back up Gmail multiple times an hour. If a client's tolerance is that tight, look at a specialist rather than a general-purpose platform.
You only want a tool for one client. We are a wholesale platform for MSPs building a backup service. For a single Workspace tenant you would be better served buying a per-tenant product directly.
The questions worth asking any vendor
- Are Shared Drives included in the base rate, or a module?
- What is the maximum retention period, and what does long retention cost?
- Can I restore a departed user's mail into a different account?
- What is the overage rate once bundled storage runs out?
- Is there an egress or restore charge?
- What has the renewal increase been for each of the last three years?
Get the answers in writing. The headline per-user rate is the part of the contract least likely to surprise you.
* About the base licence. Google Workspace backup runs from a base licence — either a desktop or a server licence — in addition to the £1.20 per protected user. A desktop licence covers a maximum of two Google accounts, so any customer beyond a couple of users needs a server base licence. One server licence covers the entire Google domain however many users are protected under it, so the base cost is fixed rather than scaling with user count — on a large tenant it is a rounding error per head. Current base rates are on the cost calculator, which is public and needs no login. We have flagged it here rather than leaving it to appear on a quote, because the total is what matters when you are comparing platforms.