Free for up to 10 workspaces — funded by donations
Your Google Workspace, backed up with honesty.
Self-hosted backup for Gmail, Drive, Calendars, Contacts and Shared Drives.
- No card, no trial clocks
- Runs on your own server
- Funded by people like you
Latest news
Update to v0.9611.
We had to push out an update due to a problem which became apparent when working with large workspaces. No backed up data was affected, but getting it via Restore was a pain — to put it mildly.
The problem was that the logic queried every row in the client database before presenting the interface. That meant a long wait in extreme cases — two minutes or so — and it could look like a timeout. Because this process runs synchronously, other events were affected too. It is why other things, such as the licence checker, failed to reach the server to validate, and a message would pop up.
This was a design flaw on my part. I have implemented a cache, so most of the information to display or retrieve is not worked out afresh every time. Finally, we implemented a page-at-a-time load on the Restore screen itself.
We also noticed a couple of other areas with a similar load pattern, and those were updated too.
The release notes explain it properly.
A labour of love
Why we built our own Google Workspace backup.
GWS Backup wasn’t cooked up in a boardroom. KIKO Solutions is a managed service provider in Christchurch, Dorset, and this started as our own frustration: we tried what was already out there and kept coming back unsatisfied.
To be fair to them, the tools we tried are good ones. They just weren’t what we needed — we wanted the data sitting in storage we control and can audit, not in somebody else’s cloud on trust, and we wanted to be told plainly when a run went wrong instead of being shown a green tick.
So we built it. Evening after evening, release after release, every screen has been argued over, torn up, and rebuilt until it felt right. You choose your own storage destination — S3, Azure, Google Drive, or a local disk — and your data never touches anyone else’s infrastructure.
We run our own clients’ backups on it every day. Not a demo instance, not a staging copy — the same software you are downloading. When something is wrong with it, it is our weekend too, and that is the only quality guarantee we can honestly offer.
That’s also why it’s free for up to ten workspaces. Software built with this much care deserves to be used. If it saves your day (or your job), a donation keeps it alive.
— Adam Spicer, KIKO Solutions
Our proudest feature
The end of silent failures.
When you back up a workspace for the first time, every backup tool on earth hits the same wall: Google limits how often you can ask for data and how much you can move.
Other products simply tell you the backup completed successfully. In some cases, that isn’t true.
We show the backup as stopped, explain the exact error, and resume at the next scheduled run. Only when the run has truly completed do we say so.
We hate fake stats. Honesty and transparency are our biggest features — bold engineering, safe hands.
The grand tour
Every screen, crafted by hand.
No stock dashboards, no bought-in modules. Scroll through the software the way we built it — one obsessed-over screen at a time. Click any screenshot to zoom in.
The Dashboard
Backup health, storage usage and system alerts at a glance — one calm screen that tells you the truth about the state of every workspace you protect.
- Manage one or many Google Workspaces from a single login
- Per-workspace health, storage and alert summaries
- Built for MSPs, IT teams and internal admins
The Backup Console
Every client, every endpoint, every active backup in one unified view. Problems are highlighted the moment they appear — never buried in a log file.
- Snapshot of the last run for every client
- Aggregate stats — data moved, transfer speeds
- Predicted storage needs for the year ahead
Watch the Bots Work, Live
Parallel backup bots read and write your data while staying politely inside Google’s rate limits — and you can literally watch them work on the Live Monitor.
- See every email and file as it transfers
- Schedule and retention policy summary per client
- Full audit trail — prove to clients everything is backed up
Restore Anything, To Anywhere
Entire workspaces, single accounts, or that one file the accounts team deleted on Friday. Every backup keeps the previous copy of a changed file, so you can go back to how things were on a chosen date — including to before ransomware encrypted them.
- Restore whole workspaces, accounts, or single items
- Pick an earlier version of a file by date, or roll a whole account back to a chosen backup
- A change chart per account, so a mass encryption or a mass deletion stands out
- 5-step Recovery Wizard with pre-flight safety checks
Deep Investigations
Find a specific email or Drive file across every backup you hold, in seconds, using deep search indexing — without downloading a single archive.
- Search indexed backups across all clients
- Read emails in basic form for investigations
- Every action is audited and reportable
Reporting That Wins Clients
Every aspect of the software can be reported on — proof of your work for clients, or trends that justify a course of action. Custom-branded, and genuinely engaging.
- Branded reports with stats, charts and tables
- Export to PDF or Word (docx)
- Evidence-grade audit output for compliance
Additional features
Scheduler
High-frequency incremental backups, overlap detection, and load-aware planning.
Data Retention
Custom compliance policies tuned to your country’s data protection law.
Clients
Multiple Google Workspace domains from one interface — perfect for MSPs.
Workspace Admin
Everyday domain admin tasks handled inside GWS Backup itself.
Settings
Storage destinations, 2FA login security, appearance and team accounts.
Total Backup
Emails, Calendars, Contacts, Shared Drives — even desktop-synced folders.
Runs where you run
Flexible deployment, no lock-in.
Available now
Zero-config Linux & cPanel
A lightweight, standalone .zip package. Drop it into cPanel or any Linux VPS and run. No complex dependency installations required.
Available now
Native Windows installer
One .exe that brings its own Node runtime and registers the app to start with Windows before anyone signs in. A machine that reboots overnight keeps backing up.
Available now
Official Docker support
The “easy button” for self-hosting. A published image and a compose file, for instant, perfectly isolated deployment on any host OS.
Editions
Three ways to run it. The first one costs nothing.
Up to ten client workspaces, the complete application, no charge — no trial clock and no feature held back. Beyond ten there is a larger licence by arrangement, and for putting it in front of your own clients under your own name there is the white-label edition.
GWS Backup — the whole application
£0/ up to 10 workspaces
Everything below is included, with no feature withheld. Donations are welcome and never required; they buy no extra features, because there are none to buy.
- Up to 10 client workspaces, unlimited accounts within them
- Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Calendars and Contacts
- Your storage: Google Drive, S3-compatible, Azure, or local disk
- Restore to the original account, another account, or download
- Deleted items kept for a year, then pruned automatically
- Scheduling, retention, and a planner to spread the load
- Investigations, audit logging and branded reporting
- Archive a client, and retire one properly when the time comes
More than ten workspaces?
Then you are running a business on this, and so are we. There is no price list yet and no tier ladder — get in touch and we will sort something out that works for both of us. Everyone who has already asked for an unlimited licence will receive one, as promised. Ask about a larger licence.
What a licence key is for
One key runs one installation at a time. It is how we know roughly how many people rely on this and whether a release broke something — not a meter, and not a way to switch your backups off. Verification fails open: if our licence server is unreachable, your console keeps working.
Not open source
Use it commercially, for up to ten client workspaces, at no charge. You may not resell it, rebrand it, or pass it off as your own — that is what the white-label option is for. The licence is short and written in English.
Powered by you
No investors. No subscriptions. Just people who find it useful.
GWS Backup is developed by a tiny team who genuinely love this thing. Donating unlocks no features and raises no limits — there is nothing held back to sell you. If it protects something you care about, a donation of any size funds bug fixes, new features, and the servers it’s tested on.
Donate
One-off or recurring — every pound goes straight into development time, and into the servers this is tested on. It buys you nothing extra, and that is rather the point.
Report bugs
A good bug report is a gift. Help us keep the “zero silent failures” promise.
Spread the word
Tell another sysadmin, MSP, or parent. Growth by word of mouth keeps us independent.
Prefer bank transfer or a company invoice? Use the contact form — we’ll sort it.
For MSPs & resellers
Two things sit above the standard licence, and enquiries about either are genuinely welcome.
More than ten workspaces
A larger licence
Everything is the same — same application, same features, just a key that covers the estate you actually run. There is no published price and no tier ladder: tell us roughly how many workspaces you protect and we will work out something that suits both of us. Everyone already on the waitlist for an unlimited licence keeps it, as promised.
Your brand, not ours
White label & custom branding
The standard licence doesn’t allow rebranding — but we do, commercially. Either take it as a full white-label edition sold and supported under your own identity, or for a one-off fee we will fit your branding into the app for you: logo, colour palette and report templates, ready to deploy.
Start backing up today.
Register in under a minute.
Your licence key will arrive by email within 1–2 days.