How to setup a Google Drive backup using Duplicati

Google Drive provides all users with 15GB of free storage and upgrading the capacity is ridiculously cheap ($1.99/month for 100GB and $9.99/month for 1TB).

We get a lot of questions from our customers on how they can utilize this low-cost, highly available cloud storage for their backups. Most customers want to use Google Drive to backup their files (documents, images, etc.) and their business data (Simply Accounting data, Quickbooks, etc.)

There are different ways to back up to your Google Drive:

• Using the default Google Drive sync application – this method sync’s the contents of the Google Drive folder on your computer to the Google Drive.
  • Pros: simple and easy to use
  • Cons: it is restricted to only backing up the contents of the Google Drive folder, it doesn’t support scheduling for synchronization
• Using Duplicati
  • Pros: free, highly secure, able to schedule backup jobs, also stores files in an encrypted .zip file format
  • Cons: requires a bit of configuration (which we’ll be going over in this guide)

Here’s how you get Duplicati running with Google Drive

1. Sign up for a Google account if you haven’t yet
2. Download Duplicati from here use the 32 or 64 bit version depending on your operating system.
   You can check this by right clicking on “Computer” then selecting “Properties” it will tell you in the “System Type” section.
3. Install Duplicati by running the file
4. Once Duplicati has finished installing, start the Duplicati wizard
5. Select “Schedule a new backup”
6. Enter a backup name
7. Select the folders you’d like to backup, you can also choose non-default folders by selecting “Custom folder list”
8. Enter a complex password to encrypt your backup file. This adds another layer of security to your data in case your Google Apps password ever becomes compromised. Click next after you’ve entered a password.
9. Select “Google Docs”
10. Enter your Google account’s credentials and a name for the backup collection (Duplicati will create a new folder in Google Drive and store your files here). Click next and it will prompt you to test the connection then create the collection, answer yes to both.
11. You can now schedule the backup to automatically run. Select the backup frequency you’d like then click next.
12. All Done! When your backup runs you can check Duplicati’s backup screen for the progress or any errors.