When you use Google services, you trust Google with your most sensitive information: Emails, contacts, calendars--the works. What could possibly go wrong As it turns out, quite a bit. Google is not infallible, and even if it were, users can make mistakes. Spanning Backup ($3 per month for regular Google accounts users) is a cloud backup service that keeps a copy of all of your Google data and lets you restore it selectively should important data ever go missing.

More »

Spanning Backup gets a lot of things right: The price, the easy setup, and the brilliant Gmail interface. If that same visual simplicity makes it to the Calendar, Contacts, and Docs restoring interfaces, Spanning Backup would be a truly exceptional service.

More »

Spanning, which already offers a backup service for Google Apps, is now riding the coattails of Google Drive, promising to help people see, “What’s in your Google Drive?”

Two days after the Drive announcement, Spanning released a free tool called Spanning Stats that analyzes your Google Drive account. The company says its report provides data including the percentage documents in your Google Drive by type, the 10 newest and oldest files, how much of the total storage quota you’re using by file type, the 10 biggest files, and the 10 users using the most storage space

More »

Google gives us email, calendars and all kinds of other stuff for free, and we're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. But sometimes that horse swallows our stuff. Google Calendar, in particular, is notorious for making events disappear.

It doesn't offer much help for getting events back, either. If you deleted an event on purpose, you have a few seconds to click 'Undo,' and then it's basically gone forever. If it disappears due to a glitch, tough luck.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

More »

Google Calendar’s been dealing with a bug that suddenly deletes entries, with no hope of recovery. The issue’s since been solved, but it wasn’t Google that fixed the problem. Now live in the Google Marketplace, Spanning Undelete is an application that will recover your data and prevent you from losing calendar entries for good. This is only part of the salvo of tools that Spanning will release in the coming months.

More »

Austin-based cloud apps startup Spanning, which provides a backup service for Google Apps, just launched a new version of its service (Spanning 3.0) which includes a feature I.T. admins are sure to love: a health monitor for Google Apps. The new dashboard shows the status of a company’s Google Apps system, including problems, errors, possible causes and suggested fixes. Day-by-day reports are available, too.

More »

Cloud storage is no longer in the early adopter phase. Businesses have adopted Google Apps so wholeheartedly that it only makes sense for Google to capitalize on this chunk of the market.

All the hype and excitement aside, Google will need to overcome some serious challenges if it’s going to succeed. Here are five things Google needs to do to make GDrive a success and to tap multiple markets in the coming year.

More »

Austin, Texas-based startup Spanning has embraced the concept of cloud computing so much that its product is a backup service for Google Apps — completely hosted and run from Amazon Web Services. The idea of backing up one cloud service via another was intriguing enough that I asked Mike Pav, the VP of engineering at Spanning, how he does it

More »

Although Google Apps might seem like a simple platform, it’s definitely one of the most prevalent cloud options as it is used by over four million companies worldwide and counting. Thus, a group of seven independent software vendors have formed an alliance, which they boast is “a first among Google Apps Marketplace vendors.”

Officially dubbed as the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps, the group is comprised of a series of business and technology partnerships designed to make it easier for Google Apps users to select and implement complementary business applications.

The seven aforementioned vendors consist of Cloud Sherpas, Expensify, Insightly, Okta, RunMyProcess, Smartsheet and Spanning.

More »

Austin startup Spanning Cloud Apps didn't plan to seek venture capital, but the buzz surrounding cloud technology changed founder Charlie Wood's mind.

"We wanted to grow the company organically, but we realized it would take us years to do that, and in the meantime the market would pass us by," Wood said. "So we decided to raise money and step on the gas."

Now, thanks to a $2 million investment in April from Foundry Group of Boulder, Colo., 1-year-old Spanning Cloud is hiring engineers, sales people and marketers, with a goal of doubling its 10-person staff by year's end.

More »

I wrote a blog post yesterday about my move to the cloud. It has gotten 234 comments so far and another 49 on Hacker News. It's pretty clear from reading the comments on both places that moving to the cloud is something many have done, many more are doing, and a few are resisting. It's also clear to me that it is the future

More »

Fred Wilson recently posted about his move to the cloud and the freedom that having his data always available has given him. More and more people and companies are freeing themselves from the constraints of desktop software and captive data stores in favor of cloud based applications and the freedom of readily (and always) available data. We recently went through a similar move at Foundry - although we haven't completely moved to Google Apps for all of our documents and spreadsheets - and it's been incredibly liberating.

More »

James Fallows at the Atlantic writes a terrifying and personal account of what it’s like to lose one’s entire Google archive to a hacker. Fallows’ wife’s Gmail account was hijacked by a spammer, who not only stole her identity and tried to phish money from her personal contacts, but also vandalized the account by permanently deleting everything in it. She eventually regained control of the account using Google’s standard protocol for these situations, but:

More »

The Austin-based startup Spanning Cloud Apps, a cloud-based app developer, today announced that it has closed a $2 million series A round, led by the Foundry Group, a VC firm based in Boulder.

More »

When my Microsoft Office applications are acting up, Google Docs is always there to save the day. Earlier today, I tried sorting files in my Google Docs and was quite surprised to see that I have actually stored several files that are non-native in this platform—literally becoming an extension of my hard drive rather than an avenue for collaboration. Imagine how terrified I was when it went suffered downtime and momentarily crashed last week, leaving me wishing for offline functionality.

More »

Now that I have spent the last 24 days prolifically cranking out 30 Days With...Google Docs blog posts and feature articles on various subjects, I have a fair amount of content built up in Google Docs. So, the question I inevitably ask myself is "hey, what happens if Google crashes and my data disappears?"

More »

We've written before about Backupify.com, a backup service for several cloud-based apps such as Google Docs, Facebook and LinkedIn. A new service from Spanning Backup that does the same for corporate Google Docs accounts launches today.

More »

Google Apps has gained a foothold in many organizations: it's an easy solution for managing email, calendars and documents. It can be rolled out in a matter of minutes and requires little training. But one of the biggest dilemma that Google Apps users face is how to appropriately back up their data.

More »

Products to do this exist but are not widely used. There's Spanning Backup, for example. As of this week, it backs up both Google documents and e-mails. It's designed to rescue users from their own inadvertent changes of deletions of files, but it could also be used to restore files if Google Docs itself suffered a catastrophic failure.

More »

Austin, Texas-based startup Spanning launched a new version of its Google Apps backup service today, which now includes business-grade backup for Gmail. Previously, the company provided backup for other Google Apps products, including Google Calendar, Docs, and Contacts, but, says, Spanning Cloud Apps founder and CEO Charlie Wood, “Gmail backup has been, by far, the most requested capability from our existing customer base.”

But Google Apps is already in the cloud – why do you need to back it up?

According to the company, even a company of Google’s size can have issues leading to data deletions. And not all data deletions are Google’s fault – sometimes, the end users themselves are to blame. Then what do you do? User-deleted data isn’t Google’s problem, so it can’t (and won’t) help you recover.

More »

Spanning on Tuesday will roll out its latest backup service for Google Apps and add Gmail to the mix. With the move, Spanning is positioning itself as a business class Google Apps backup service aimed at enterprises.

The Austin, TX-based startup has a highly rated backup service on the Google Apps Marketplace, but CEO Charlie Wood said customers were frequently requesting Gmail backup. While Wood’s company competes with Backupify in areas, Spanning is going deep with its business focus while its rival is more horizontal.

“We are targeting businesses,” said Wood. “The larger the company the more sophisticated they are. They recognize the need for backups.” Specifically, Spanning is eyeing companies with 1,000 to 4,000-seat Google Apps accounts.

More »

Charlie Wood, CEO of Spanning, talks about protecting against user error (the silent killer). Charlie talks about the ways that his product backs up Google Apps and lists many lesser considered elements of backup.

More »

Those who use Google Apps probably assume data is safer in a cloud than it is on a laptop, prone to being dropped and spilled upon. Spanning Backup says otherwise, offering data protection services against data loss on Google's end. The service, priced at $3.95 a month or $39.95 a year after a free 30 day trial, will backup your calendars, contacts, and Google Docs files in case of a cloud catastrophe.

More »

I find it endlessly entertaining that people say things like "I don't need to back up my data anymore because it's in the cloud." These people have never experienced a cloud failure, accidentally deleted a specific contact record, or authenticated an app that messed up their account. They will. And it will be painful. I became a believer in backing up my data when I was 17 years old and had my first data calamity.

More »