Your Google Workspace, backed up.
Self-hosted backup for Gmail, Drive, Calendars, Contacts and Shared Drives. Free for up to 10 workspaces — funded by donations.
- No card, no trial clocks
- Runs on your own server
- Funded by people like you
How it works
Version 1 is out. Three steps, then it looks after itself.
Version 1 has been released.
Bugs have been squashed and the product stripped back to the essentials you need. Your backups, settings, clients and destinations carry over untouched.
Install it.
On cPanel with a small PHP installer, on Windows with one .exe, or anywhere with Docker.
Connect your workspaces.
One or many Google Workspaces from a single login — built for MSPs, IT teams and internal admins.
Choose where backups go.
S3-compatible storage, Azure, Google Drive or a local folder — on a schedule from every hour to once a day.
A labour of love
Why we built our own Google Workspace backup.
GWS Backup wasn’t cooked up in a boardroom. We’re a managed service provider in Christchurch, Dorset, and this is the backup tool we wanted for ourselves.
Your backups live in storage you own — S3-compatible storage, Azure, Google Drive, or a folder on the PC with the Windows edition — and never touch anyone else’s infrastructure. We run our own clients’ backups on it every day, the same software you download.
It’s free for up to ten workspaces. If it saves your day, a donation keeps it alive.
— Adam Spicer, KIKO Solutions
The grand tour
Every screen, crafted by hand.
The whole application, one screen at a time.
Overview
What needs attention, what is running now, and the figures for every workspace you protect — one calm screen that tells you the truth about the state of them all.
- Manage one or many Google Workspaces from a single login
- Failed runs, connection problems and clients with no good backup for two days, first
- Built for MSPs, IT teams and internal admins
Clients
Every client in one list, with one word for its health: OK, Warning, Failed or Running. Problems are highlighted the moment they appear — never buried in a log file.
- The last run and the connection, together, in that one word
- Storage held by each client
- Active, suspended and archived clients in one place
Watch the bots work, live
Parallel backup bots read and write your data while staying politely inside Google’s rate limits — and each client’s Status page shows what they are copying right now.
- The account and file being copied, as it happens
- The last run: what was added, changed and deleted
- Every run in History, downloadable as a CSV
Restore anything, to anywhere
Entire workspaces, single accounts, or that one file deleted on Friday. Roll anything back to a chosen date — including to before ransomware hit.
- Restore whole workspaces, accounts, or single items
- Earlier versions of every file, by date
- One short restore dialog, with a check before it starts
- Google Docs, Sheets and Slides come back as Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Additional features
Scheduler
Incremental backups from every hour to once a day, set for each client, with a limit on how many run at once.
Data retention
Earlier file versions kept to your rules; deleted items kept for a year, then pruned.
Clients
Multiple Google Workspace domains from one interface — perfect for MSPs.
Backup history
Every run for a client, downloadable as a spreadsheet — one row per backup, with what it actually did.
Settings
Where backups go, users with two-step sign-in, your licence, retention, and the system itself, with its updates and log.
Total backup
Emails, Calendars, Contacts, Shared Drives — even desktop-synced folders.
Runs where you run
Flexible deployment, no lock-in.
Linux with cPanel
A .zip and a small PHP installer for cPanel’s Node.js hosting (Node.js 22.13 or newer). The installer backs up your databases first. On a Linux server without cPanel, use Docker.
Native Windows installer
One .exe. It installs Node.js if the PC needs it, and a startup task that runs the app before anyone signs in. A machine that reboots overnight keeps backing up.
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.
The complete application, free for up to ten client workspaces. Bigger estates and white-label editions by arrangement.
GWS Backup — the whole application
£0/ up to 10 workspaces
Everything included. Donations welcome, never required.
- Up to 10 client workspaces, unlimited accounts within them
- Gmail, Drive, Shared Drives, Calendars and Contacts
- Your storage: Google Drive, S3-compatible, Azure, or a local folder on Windows
- Restore to the original account or to another one
- Mail, calendars and contacts encrypted in your storage, and Drive files by default for new clients, with a key only you hold
- Deleted items kept for a year, then pruned automatically
- A schedule for each client, and one set of retention rules
- An activity log, and each client’s backup history as a CSV
- Archive a client, and retire one properly when the time comes
More than ten workspaces
A larger licence
Same application, with a key sized for the estate you actually run. Tell us roughly how many workspaces and we’ll sort it.
Your brand, not ours
White label & custom branding
Take it as a full white-label edition under your own identity, or for a one-off fee we’ll fit your logo and colours.
What a licence key is for
One key runs one installation at a time. And if our licence server is ever unreachable, your console keeps working.
Not open source
Free to use commercially — not to resell or rebrand. The licence is short and written in plain English.
Powered by you
No investors. No subscriptions. Just people who find it useful.
If GWS Backup protects something you care about, a donation of any size keeps it moving.
Donate
One-off or recurring — every pound goes straight into development time.
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.
Try it on your next ten workspaces.
Register in under a minute. We will endeavour to send your licence key automatically. If our system detects an issue with the details entered, we’ll contact you directly to confirm the submission, usually within 48 hours.