After thousands hours of coding and testing, we are glad to announce that CubeBackup version 1.0 is finally released (What a relief!). I must admit that this product takes much longer time than we expected. It is always easy to make an almost-to-work product, but it is much harder to make a real product that can be used by thousands of users. Too much time was spent on optimization and perfection, like to figure out which is the best solution for one specific tiny problem, or how to handle the situation if something unexpected happens. Not only for just CubeBackup software, we also spent so much time on the website: the design, the html style and the server-side part all went through several major modifications plus countless minor ones.
I have tried several other Google Apps backup solutions, despite the similar user interfaces, different strategies are employed in different solutions. When we designed and made CubeBackup, we just follow the guidelines below:
- Incremental backup: Except for the first time backup, CubeBackup only backs up the new or modified documents on Google Drive, new mails received or sent in Gmail, new or modified contacts, and calendar events which is still valid. Not only can this algorithm save your bandwidth and time, it can also save lots of disk space for the backup. Some Google Apps backup solutions in the market still use non-incremental backup strategy, which I cannot understand why.
- Automatic backup: CubaBackup can perform daily (or weekly, depends on your configuration) backup automatically without human operations.
- Office-compatible backup files: which can be retrieved and opened by local software. We insist that all backup data should be human readable and operational. So, all the backup files for Google Drive can be opened by Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice, etc.). Gmail backups are standard mail files which can be opened by almost all mail client software. For Calendar and Contacts backups, along with the original XML raw data, standard Contacts and Calendar format backups are also available.
We are happy to release CubeBackup today. However, CubeBackup is not perfect, and I bet there are still bugs in it and there are still lots of things that need to improve. If you have any suggestions or questions of CubeBackup, please email us: [email protected]. We are always glad to hear from you.