The long version
No marketing gloss — this is the feature list as the software actually ships, written by the person who built it. Items marked coming are in active development on the roadmap.
Complete coverage of a Google Workspace account, not just the inbox.
Every message, indexed and restorable individually — including labels.
All files, with the original folder tree recorded so restores rebuild it exactly.
Full shared-drive backup with per-drive tracking and containment on restore.
Backed up alongside mail and files; calendar restores update rather than duplicate events.
Docs, Sheets and Slides are exported to Office formats; if Google refuses an export, a PDF fallback runs, then a metadata record — nothing is silently skipped.
Data-retention features capture Gmail settings where granted, and the app tells you exactly which scopes it needs.
Built for the realities of Google's API: quotas, rate limits and very large first runs.
After the first full run, only changed files and new mail move. Unchanged data is never re-downloaded or re-uploaded — including files that were merely moved between folders.
Google doesn't change a file's modified time when it moves. GWS Backup notices anyway and updates the recorded path without re-transferring a byte.
Concurrent workers per data type, tuned to stay politely inside Google's rate limits — watch them live on the monitor.
When Google's daily quota hits, the run parks cleanly within seconds — a distinct amber status, never a fake success — and the next run continues where it left off.
Every network call gets exponential backoff, Retry-After handling and 429/5xx retries.
Cancelling a run tears down in-flight connections immediately via AbortController — no zombie threads, no leaked memory, status recorded honestly as cancelled.
A health watcher spots stalled runs and resumes them incrementally — inheriting the previous run's progress rather than starting over.
Mark folders as preserved so retention policies never touch them, on every destination type.
Your storage, your rules — and changing your mind is safe.
Google Drive, local disk / NAS, Amazon S3, and Azure Blob storage — all first-class citizens for both backup and restore.
A new destination is probed with real read, write and delete tests before a single backup is pointed at it.
Switch destinations (say, Drive to S3) and the old one is frozen as a restore-only archive — everything ever backed up stays findable and restorable.
Every destination records where each file lived, so a restore rebuilds the real folder tree — not a flat dump at the root.
The console predicts storage needs for the year ahead from real growth trends.
Utility scripts upgrade historic backups in place — recording folder paths for old rows without re-transferring data.
Backups are only as good as the restore. This is where the obsession shows.
A whole workspace, one account, one folder, or a single email or file from the File Explorer.
Three dedicated modes — Disaster Recovery, Point-in-Time Rollback, Migration/Clone — with pre-flight destination checks and a type-RESTORE confirmation gate.
Backups behave like version control: ransomware-encrypted files can be rolled back to their pre-encryption originals.
Recover an absent employee's mail or files straight into a colleague's account — no password resets, no 2FA workarounds.
Cross-account restores are tagged automatically — a Restored/<source> Gmail label, name prefixes on Drive files — so restored data is easy to find and tidy up.
Cross-account and shared-drive restores rebuild inside a clearly named container folder; anything whose original location was never recorded is quarantined in Unfiled/ instead of littering the drive root.
An interrupted restore continues where it stopped — a per-item ledger means nothing already restored is duplicated.
Restores park on daily quota just like backups, retry transient errors with backoff, and can be stopped instantly mid-run.
Every restore error is kept, listed with file and timestamp, downloadable as a client-ready report — and raw Google errors are translated into plain English.
Explicit confirmation banners for every restore — single item, batch or bulk — plus a live progress banner that survives navigation and reattaches on page load.
Per-client scheduling with overlap detection and load-aware planning.
Custom compliance policies tuned to your country's data-protection law, per client.
Scheduled optimisation compacts the app's own database — with a safety backup taken first, deep housekeeping of old rows, and scheduling that avoids your backup windows.
Jobs orphaned by a crash or restart are detected and closed out honestly on boot — nothing spins forever.
Any number of Google Workspace domains from one interface, each with its own schedule, retention and destination.
Clients can be archived with a retention countdown before permanent deletion — with an Archive Hub to restore or force-delete, and duplicate-client detection on the way in.
Separate roles for administration and restore operation, with 2FA login security.
Everyday domain admin tasks handled inside GWS Backup itself.
Search indexed backups across every client in seconds — read emails in basic form for investigations, without downloading an archive.
Custom-branded reports with stats, charts and tables — exportable to PDF or Word, evidence-grade for compliance, and genuinely engaging for clients.
Every action is audited and reportable — prove to clients that everything is backed up, restored, and handled properly.
Read-only status endpoints secured by API key, feeding a companion mobile app — check backup health from your phone.
The Enterprise edition also protects the servers your clients run on.
Full-server, granular, or databases-only scopes — MySQL/MariaDB dumps taken per table, safely, with a manifest of what was captured.
A guided wizard restores whole databases or individual tables over SSH — no database ports exposed, type-RESTORE confirmation before anything runs.
Change a server's backup schedule without touching its identity or history.
The feature the whole product is built around.
A run is only reported successful when it truly finished. Stopped, parked, partial and cancelled runs say exactly that — with the real error, in plain English.
Watch every email and file transfer in real time. Nothing is hidden behind a spinner.
Distinct, accurate states — running, parked (quota), cancelled, partial, failed, completed — on every screen, every report, every badge.
Raw Google API errors are rewritten as actionable messages, with the original preserved for support.
A standalone .zip — drop it into cPanel or any Linux VPS and run.
A standard .exe that sets up everything, including background services.
A pre-configured Docker Compose file for instant, isolated deployment on any OS.
Installs run invisibly as a service and survive reboots.
Enterprise for organisations and MSPs (available now); Family for personal Google accounts (in final development).
Free licence keys issued on registration — one key, one running installation. Supporter Keys ♥ for donors remove the in-app supporter reminder.
Roughly 50MB of RAM per client workspace — it runs happily on modest hardware.
A guided update path that backs up the app's own database before every upgrade.
That's the honest state of the software today. For what's next — the onboarding tour, the Family Edition, the companion mobile app — see the roadmap. For how it all behaves in practice, the FAQ answers the questions everyone asks.
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