Will Malaysia Back Up its Google Apps?

Yesterday, it was announced that Malaysia will adopt Google Apps for Education for over 10 million students, teachers, and parents throughout the country.  They have followed in the footsteps of the Philippines who uses Google Apps to connect 45,000 schools, 200 divisions, and 600,000 staff across more than 7,000 islands.  We were thrilled to find this out as the expansion of people using the cloud means our ability to help protect their data has grown as well.  So the big question in our head is – will the government of Malaysia back up its Google Apps data?

The problems around not backing up data are slightly different in education than they are outside of it.  Although user error remains the biggest culprit of data loss, there are particular instances specific to the education world that should be considered.  For instance, if a student is studying for an exam, but she can’t find her last few weeks of notes.  Or if a teacher is preparing for tomorrow’s class but misplaced his lesson plan.  We have even heard a story where a student wasn’t going to meet his deadline for an important paper.  He then purposefully deleted his Google doc and claimed to the teacher that “Google ate his homework”.  All these types of instances specific to Education raise the need for cloud backup even higher.

The solutions, luckily, are the same:  having a reliable automated daily backup like Backupify to ensure instances, however seemingly silly, do not disrupt the natural flow of classroom learning.  So, we encourage the Malaysian government to back up its data, as that’s an entire country’s worth of educational information that it can otherwise lose.