
Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. If that same visual simplicity makes it to the Calendar, Contacts, and Docs restoring interfaces, Spanning Backup would be a truly exceptional service.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. Spanning Backup gets a lot of things right: The price, the easy setup, and the brilliant Gmail interface. Within moments, the conversation previously “deleted forever” was back in my inbox, with a label showing it was restored by Spanning Backup. I then located the conversation on Spanning (without having to deal with snapshots), and clicked Restore. Normally, once you do this, the conversation really is gone for good. To test it, I deleted a conversation in Gmail (sent it to the Bin), and then deleted it from the Bin.

The interface shows a mirror image of the regular Gmail interface, with the same label tree and conversation headers. If Spanning Backup sent an automated email explaining what’s going on when you restore something, that could help alleviate the confusion.Ĭontrary to my experience with Contacts and Calendar, Spanning Backup’s Gmail interface was brilliant. While I understand why this is necessary, it was confusing at the time. Spanning Backup’s calendar restoration interface focuses on snapshots, and leaves much to be desired.The same thing happened when I tried to restore a calendar event: Spanning created a new calendar with the event I restored. This makes sense, but it also requires good familiarity with Gmail’s groups interface and can be confusing otherwise. All contacts restored are put into a group showing they were restored, so you can extract the contacts you need, and then delete all other contacts in the group. It turns out this is not a bug, but a feature: Spanning Backup calls this “ non-destructive restore,” and it means Spanning Backup never deletes your existing contacts when it restores an old backup, even if duplicates are created.
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I realized this had happened when all my contacts started showing up twice on my Android phone, though at first I thought something must be wrong with the phone. Spanning Backup then proceeded to restore all of my contacts, even those that were not deleted, creating over 360 duplicate contacts. After hunting around the snapshot list for a snapshot that contained the group I needed, I ended up clicking the earliest snapshot thinking that snapshot surely has the contact I need. Instead, it let me pick a contact group to restore–and it wasn’t the group the contact I deleted was in.

I expected Spanning to show me contacts deleted or modified since that backup was made. Not ideal, but not too confusing: I clicked the latest successful backup, taken before I deleted the contact. When I tried to restore it, Spanning Backup presented me with a list of backup timestamps showing the dates of recent successful backups. To test Spanning Backup, I deleted a Google contact. Speaking of restoration, the data restoration interface leaves a lot to be desired.
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You don’t get to download any of it to your own computer, and you can only restore it to the account from which it was backed up.

All information is saved over the cloud, onto Spanning Backup’s own servers. The information Spanning Backup saves is extensive: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts, right down to contact images.
