When you have staff leaving the business or you simply need to delete a user, G Suite provided tools that allow you to move their data from Drive or Calendar. But what about retaining their mailbox data? Find out your options through this video.
In this video, Pete discusses common questions from users such as: How do you delete G Suite users and retain their data? Are there any other Google applications that you can use that’s not tied to the account?
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
As a business owner, it's important that we keep our business data but doing these things on your own may not be a great use of your time. If you need help with anything IT for your business, let us know and our team will reach out to you.
TRANSCRIPTION:
G’day there, Pete Moriarty here. In this video, I'm covering off what you should do when you delete a user in your G Suite account, and how you can make sure you retain their data so it's not deleted forever.
If you don't already know itGenius, we are a small and micro business IT consultancy, and we help small business owners all over the world with their IT needs. Now that might be something within the G Suite world or ecosystem. It might be other cloud apps like Zapier or cloud task management like Asana, or it might be something more traditional IT support like networks or printers or desktop computers. If you need any help with anything, you can head along to itgenius.com.
Now let's talk about your G Suite account and when it's time to move on a staff member or delete a user. Google gave us tools to transfer the calendar data and transfer the Google Drive data when we go to delete a user within G Suite, but they don't give us the option to retain any of the data related to someone's email, and that can be a bit of a problem. When we have staff going out of the business, we don't necessarily want to delete all of their stuff.
As business owners, it's important that we keep our business data, because a customer might come back to us in a year's time or a couple of years time and say, “Hey, can you give me the same price as last time,” or, “I want to sue you because of that thing that your staff said to me three years ago on email,” and in each of those cases, you need to make sure that you have a copy and a record of that data. Now what you have in the Google world to address that is you have Google Vault, and Google Vault is available for anyone on a business or an enterprise plan on G Suite, and Google Vault is useful, but it only takes a copy of each one of the emails in and out of the business. It's still tied to a user account, and so if you delete your user account, it's going to delete the Google Drive archive for that user as well.
So if you're going to delete a user, Google Vault doesn't really solve the problem for that data not disappearing. Now Google does give you a tool, it's called the Google Migrator, and that's available inside the Google account, and you could use that to try and migrate data, but to be honest, we've had very poor results with that tool. It gives errors and it's not always guaranteed to have a hundred percent data integrity, which means that even if you run that tool, not all of the emails may be saved.
So what's the solution? Well, we have a staff off-boarding or staff deprovisioning process that we use anytime one of our customers deprovisions or needs to remove a member of staff. Yes, using the Google tools to transfer calendars and Drive documents are effective, but that mailbox is something that's the most important to be moved. What we recommend is setting up one mailbox and calling that the archive user mailbox. That's the one mailbox where everyone's email is going to be dumped into.
Now that archive user mailbox can be delegated back to your account so when you want to access that mailbox, you don't have to remember the username and password, and you may even want multiple staff to be able to log in and read, send and receive any emails from that mailbox with all of the archive data.
Now the final step is to actually move that user's data in, and so what you do from there is you actually grab the user's data, and for us, we use specialized third party tools to migrate the user's mailbox into the archive mailbox data. What that means is you'll have that one repository for all past users of your company, and that will be easily searchable, easily accessible by you and anyone else who needs access to it, and none of that data ever disappears.
If right now you're managing this yourself and your deleting and adding and setting up staff and doing all of these operations, it's probably not great use of your time as a business owner. So if you'd like assistance with that, you may be interested in our concierge support service. Head along to itgenius.com, and you can learn about all the benefits that we have for small business owners and how you may use this service to help you save more time. Especially when it comes to either setting up new user or deprovisioning and deleting users when you need to retain their data, we can save you a bunch of time and make those problems go away, or drop a link below so you can get access to that and let us know if we can help with anything in the Google world for you or for your team. If you'd like an IT audit where a team can look into your IT systems and have a look at everything you're doing and provide some recommendations, we can certainly help with that as well. Until next time, cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
