That's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops..
But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.
Actually, since SugarSync inaugurated the shameless plug portion of the thread, let it be said that Google Apps is hard to manually backup. That why we automated it at Backupify. http://www.backupify.com
Automatic daily Google Apps backups -- all of it, even Google Sites -- for just $3 per user per month. Unlimited storage. One-click restore for Google Docs and Gmail messages. And we're soon rolling out full-domain search, so you can query all your Gmail, Docs and Calendar accounts simultaneously.
We also backup your Twitter Feed, your Facebook Pages and your Flickr or Picasa photo albums, should the need arise.
Also, for the record, we have a 1-800 number that we actually answer, so in the event you have trouble with our service, we'll pick up the phone and talk you through the fix. We can't repair your Apps account, but we can darn well make sure you get to the data that's in it. We wouldn't charge you, otherwise.
Do you have any integration (or plans for integration) with Dropbox? I'd love to sign up to a service that simply dumps a copy of all my backed up files to a Dropbox folder somewhere, once a week.
That's on our roadmap, yes. In the future we'll be storage-agnostic, so you can use our S3 storage, your own S3 storage, Box.net, Dropbox, and a few other options we're mulling over.
The $4.99 per month plan, Backupify Pro 100, allows for 5 users on an Apps domain and 20GB of storage. That plan is geared towards small mom & pop operations, not the bigdog system e1ven was running.
Our Pro 500 plan is $19.99 per month and includes 10 Google Apps users and unlimited storage. That actually breaks down to less than $2 per user per month. Beyond that first ten, additional users are $3 per user per month. I usually just quote the $3 figure for simplicity's sake, especially since most admins using a paid Google Apps domain (Google Apps Premium) have more than 10 users anyway.
Aren't the Google Docs GDATA enabled? [1] If so then it should be pretty straightforward to write a script which would pull down copies of any file that had changed for local backup.
I understood that, he's going through the 'standard' Google escalation process for paying customers. Someone from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in the docs group is no doubt working on a ticket to track down broken GFS cell or maybe a PCR (that was code for changes that might take out a whole cluster or data center for periods of time). Its probably one of a few dozen they are looking at and given the layering the actual fix could take a couple of days to take hold, especially if the data in question is actually only available on tape at this point.
But he's an operations guy like me, and he probably wears both a belt and suspenders just in case the belt breaks. So in response to the complaint that emailing yourself files to insure you have copies is a pain, I suggested he script the moral equivalent using Google's provided APIs to the docs service.
But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.