Backup & recovery
Backing up your nonprofit's data. All of it.
Google Workspace backup, Mac backup, and the device management that makes both of them possible — with current pricing and a clear recommendation for each.
All pricing verified against vendor pages on 4 August 2026.
The short version
Two different things need backing up, and they need two different tools.
Workspace — email & docs
CubeBackup
$2 / user / year
Nonprofit rate. Shared drives free. Self-hosted, so the data stays in storage you control.
Mac laptops
Backblaze Business
$99 / computer / year
Or CrashPlan at $88 / user / year if you have a compliance requirement or two machines per person.
Getting it deployed
Mosyle
Free to 30 devices
Then $1 / device / month. Already on Jamf Now? Stay there — it does the job.
Google keeps your Workspace data available. Keeping it recoverable is your job. A deleted account, an emptied shared drive, or a compromised mailbox gets a short recovery window, and then the data is gone. The laptop that walks out of a coffee shop with three weeks of unsynced work on it is a different problem again, and it needs a different tool.
Neither backup tool deploys itself. Both install silently on staff Macs through your device management system. If you don't have one, start there.
A 12-person organization can have all three running for roughly $1,200 a year.
Google Workspace: email and documents
Why Google isn't your backup
This is the part that surprises people, so we'll be blunt about it.
Google replicates your data across data centers. That protects you from Google losing it. It does nothing about your own organization losing it: a departing staffer's account deleted a little too promptly, a shared drive cleared out by someone who assumed it was archived, a compromised account that deletes a mailbox on its way out.
Once a Google account is deleted, its data enters a short recovery window measured in days, and then it is unrecoverable. There is no support ticket that undoes it.
Google Vault is not a backup either
Vault is a retention and legal-discovery tool. It holds messages and files according to rules you set, so you can search and export them for a lawsuit or an investigation. It's useful for that. What it will not do is put anything back: it doesn't cover all of Drive, and it can't recover a deleted account.
Vault comes with Business Plus and Enterprise. Nonprofits can get Business Plus for $6.16 per user per month on an annual commitment. Real money, but not out of reach. Just don't buy it thinking you've bought a backup.
| Edition | Nonprofit price | Storage | Vault? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace for Nonprofits | $0 / user / month | 100 TB shared across all users | No |
| Business Standard | $3.50 / user / month (annual) | 2 TB per user | No |
| Business Plus | $6.16 / user / month (annual) | 5 TB per user | Yes |
| Enterprise Standard / Plus | 70%+ off standard | As much as you need | Yes |
The free and Standard tiers cap at 2,000 users. Enterprise has no cap.
What to actually use
CubeBackup — our recommendation for most nonprofits. $2 per user per year at the education and nonprofit rate. Shared drives are backed up at no additional charge. It covers mail, Drive, shared drives, calendars, contacts, and sites.
The catch
CubeBackup is self-hosted. You run it on a server, either a small cloud VM or an on-premise machine, pointed at storage you own (Backblaze B2, Amazon S3, Azure, or a local disk). No vendor holds your data, which for many nonprofits is the appeal. The flip side is that with no technical staff and no consultant on hand, nobody will notice the day it stops running.
The alternatives, and why they place lower
- OpenText (formerly CloudAlly) — fully hosted, nothing to run, no minimums. But pricing is quote-only and there's no published nonprofit rate. Worth a quote if you specifically want someone else holding the data.
- Afi.ai — three backups a day, five-user minimum, and they state they offer discounted nonprofit pricing. Also quote-only. Get a written nonprofit number before shortlisting it.
- SpinOne / SpinBackup — $3 per user per month looks fine until the footnote: a $5,000 per year minimum subscription. That rules it out for most organizations under about 140 staff.
- CrashPlan — backs up Microsoft 365 at $4 per user per month, but its self-serve small-business plans cover endpoints and Microsoft 365 only. Google Workspace backup lives on the enterprise side, which is quote-only and gated at 250+ employees. If you're a Google shop under that size, CrashPlan is not your Workspace answer.
Leaving Microsoft 365 for Google Workspace? Start with How to escape Microsoft 365, then come back here to cover the new stack.
Mac computers
Everything above protects what's in the cloud. None of it touches the laptop itself.
That matters more than people expect. The files that never make it to Drive are disproportionately the ones in progress: the report someone is drafting, the export they're halfway through cleaning up. A stolen laptop or a failed drive takes those with it.
The two options worth comparing
| Backblaze Business | CrashPlan (small business) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $99 / computer / year | $88 / user / year · $158 / 2 years |
| Licensed by | Computer | User — up to 2 devices each |
| Storage | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Version history | 30 days standard; 1 year free; forever at $0.006/GB/month for files over a year old | Unlimited |
| Deleted file retention | Follows version history setting | 90 days maximum, customizable |
| Compliance certifications | Not published | SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, Star Level One |
| Admin controls | Included in Business | Included |
| SSO / restricted restore | Enterprise Control add-on, quote only | — |
| Nonprofit discount | None | None |
| Size limit | — | Up to 249 employees |
How to choose
Take Backblaze if you have one Mac per staff member, no formal compliance obligation, and you want the simplest thing that works. Free one-year version history covers the realistic disaster: someone notices a file is wrong or missing weeks, not years, later.
Take CrashPlan if any of these apply:
- Staff commonly have two machines each — a laptop and a desk Mac. Two devices under one $88 license beats two $99 licenses.
- A funder, an auditor, or a data-sharing agreement asks you to name your vendor's certifications. CrashPlan publishes SOC 2 and ISO 27001; Backblaze does not publish equivalents.
- You want unlimited version history with no per-gigabyte charge for old files.
Confirm before you sign
CrashPlan's current pricing page lists SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and Star Level One — it does not name HIPAA or GDPR. If you handle health data and need a business associate agreement, get that confirmed in writing from CrashPlan before you commit.
Neither vendor discounts for nonprofits
Neither product has a TechSoup listing or a nonprofit program. The only meaningful lever is the term: CrashPlan's two-year rate works out to $79 per user per year, about 10% off, and Backblaze offers roughly 8% for a two-year commitment.
Why not just build it yourself?
Fair question. You're supplying the storage either way, so what do the license fees actually buy?
For Google Workspace: the API plumbing and the restore
Pulling data out of Google is the easy half. A do-it-yourself pipeline has to handle service-account authentication with domain-wide delegation and token refresh, six separate Google APIs each with their own pagination behavior, Drive's aggressive rate limiting, and incremental sync so it isn't re-downloading everything every night.
Then comes the half everyone underestimates. Restoring is much harder than backing up. Putting a mailbox back into Gmail with its labels intact, or a document back into the right Drive folder with the right sharing permissions, is real work. A script that only knows how to download hasn't solved your problem.
The closest do-it-yourself option is rclone on a schedule, writing to object storage. It works, and it covers Drive only: no Gmail, no calendars. It has no restore tooling, and nothing tells you when it quietly stops. You still need the server. At $2 per user per year, there isn't much of a decision to make.
For Macs: Time Machine can be pushed by MDM, with caveats
Mosyle and Jamf can both deploy a Time Machine destination by configuration profile, so an in-house alternative to Backblaze or CrashPlan is technically available. Three things to weigh first:
- It needs a reachable destination. Network Time Machine backs up to an SMB share. Staff working from home can't reach an office NAS without a VPN, and Time Machine over a wide-area link has a long history of corrupted sparsebundles.
- No central reporting. Nothing tells you a Mac stopped backing up six weeks ago. You find out on the day you needed it.
- It is local-disk only. Time Machine cannot back up Gmail, a shared drive nobody has mounted, or a departed employee's account. It does not overlap with the Workspace problem at all.
For an organization whose staff are all in one office with a NAS on the same network, Time Machine by MDM is a legitimate way to save the per-machine license fee, and worth pricing out. For a distributed team, that's what the cloud services are for.
Device management, and why it's the actual first step
Both backup agents install as a standard macOS package, and both need Full Disk Access granted by a configuration profile. Without a device management system that means walking to each Mac, installing by hand, and clicking through a permissions dialog — then doing it again for every new hire, with no way to see which machines have quietly stopped backing up.
With one, it's a checkbox. This is the step that turns “we bought backup software” into “our fleet is backed up.”
Mosyle
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Business FREE | $0, up to 30 devices | MDM, endpoint security, DNS filtering, authentication, app management |
| Business Premium | $1.00 / device / month | Billed annually · 30-license minimum |
| Fuse for macOS | $3.00 / device / month | Billed annually · 30-license minimum · adds the full security stack |
| Fuse for iOS / iPadOS | $1.50 / device / month | Billed annually · 30-license minimum |
Apple Watch is covered by an iPhone license and Apple TV by a Mac or iPhone license, at no extra cost.
The free tier is the headline. Thirty devices, with full MDM and app deployment, at no cost. Most nonprofit fleets fit inside that. There is no reason for an organization under 30 Macs to be unmanaged.
Deploying either backup agent through Mosyle is a standard package push plus a configuration profile for Full Disk Access. Neither vendor publishes Mosyle-specific documentation, but the process is the same as any other package.
Jamf Now
Free for up to three devices. Beyond that, Jamf does not publish a per-device price anywhere on its site. The pricing page routes to sales or a reseller. Budget around $4 per device per month and confirm the actual figure at signup.
Jamf Now has one plan, and it includes custom application and custom profile deployment, so both backup agents deploy through Blueprints with no upgrade required. Jamf positions Jamf Now at organizations under 25 employees; larger fleets are pushed toward Jamf Pro.
Which one
If you have no MDM today, start with Mosyle. Free to 30 devices, and $1 per device per month after that is the cheapest managed path available. If you're already on Jamf Now, stay there. It does what you need, and migrating device management is disruptive for no gain. Deploy the backup agent through the system you already have.
What this costs
Realistic annual figures, using our recommended stack.
Small — 12 staff, 12 Macs
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| CubeBackup — 12 users at $2 / user / year | $24 |
| Backblaze Business — 12 computers at $99 | $1,188 |
| Mosyle Business FREE | $0 |
| Total | ~$1,212 / year |
Plus storage for the Workspace backup target.
Mid-size — 45 staff, 55 Macs
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| CubeBackup — 45 users at $2 / user / year | $90 |
| CrashPlan — 45 users at $88 (covers 2 devices each) | $3,960 |
| Mosyle Business Premium — 55 devices at $1 / month | $660 |
| Total | ~$4,710 / year |
At this size CrashPlan's per-user licensing wins: Backblaze on the same 55 machines would be $5,445, and CrashPlan covers them for $3,960.
Larger — 120 staff, 130 Macs
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| CubeBackup — 120 users at $2 / user / year | $240 |
| CrashPlan — 120 users at $88 | $10,560 |
| Mosyle Business Premium — 130 devices at $1 / month | $1,560 |
| Total | ~$12,360 / year |
A two-year CrashPlan commitment drops that to roughly $11,280 a year. Storage for the CubeBackup target is extra and modest: object storage priced by the gigabyte, typically a small line item next to the software.
How CampaignHelp helps
The hard part of backup isn't buying it. It's that it has to keep working, quietly, on machines nobody looks at — and a backup that has stopped looks exactly like one that's running.
We set it up so it keeps running.
Setup — a fixed-fee project
- 1
Assessment. What you have: Workspace edition and user count, Mac inventory, existing MDM, any compliance obligations. We tell you what’s actually exposed today.
- 2
Vendor selection. A recommendation with the numbers behind it, sized to your fleet, not a generic comparison.
- 3
Device management. Mosyle or Jamf Now configured from scratch, or your existing tenant reviewed and corrected. Enrollment for every Mac, including the ones nobody has touched in a year.
- 4
Silent deployment. Backup agent packaged, signed, and pushed with the Full Disk Access profile pre-approved. Staff see nothing and do nothing.
- 5
Google Workspace backup. CubeBackup stood up on its own server with storage you own, initial full backup completed and verified.
- 6
A restore test. We delete a test file and a test account and put them back. An untested backup is a hypothesis.
- 7
Written policy. What’s backed up, how far back it goes, who can request a restore, and how. One page, in plain language, that your team can use.
Ongoing — optional monthly
- Backup status monitored across the fleet, so we chase the machine that stopped reporting rather than waiting for you to notice.
- New hires enrolled and covered on day one; departures handled without losing their data.
- Periodic restore tests, so you know the thing works instead of assuming it.
- Vendor pricing and packaging watched, because both change often and quietly.
Scoping and pricing depend on your fleet size and what's already in place. We'll size it against your actual numbers, not a bracket.
Start here
Count your Macs and your Workspace users — everything else follows from those two numbers. If you have no device management and you're under 30 devices, open a Mosyle Business FREE account today; it costs nothing and it's the prerequisite for the rest.
Then do the Workspace side first. It's $2 a user per year and it protects the data most likely to be lost to an ordinary mistake. The Macs come next. And test a restore before you call any of it done.
Book a free discovery callSources
All pricing verified 4 August 2026 against vendor pages.
- CrashPlan small business pricing — smb.crashplan.com/smb-pricing/
- CrashPlan enterprise — crashplan.com/enterprise-pricing/
- Backblaze Computer Backup pricing — backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing
- Backblaze extended version history — backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-version-history
- CubeBackup pricing — cubebackup.com/pricing
- CubeBackup on-premises overview — cubebackup.com/docs/faq/advantage-on-premises-gsuite-backup-solution/
- OpenText (formerly CloudAlly) SaaS backup pricing — cybersecurity.opentext.com/products/saas-backup/pricing/
- Afi.ai pricing — afi.ai/pricing
- Spin.AI pricing — spin.ai/pricing/
- Google Workspace for Nonprofits — google.com/nonprofits/offerings/workspace/
- Mosyle Business pricing — business.mosyle.com/pricing
- Jamf Now — jamf.com/products/jamf-now/
- Jamf pricing — jamf.com/pricing/
Jamf Now's single-plan structure was confirmed vendor-direct to CampaignHelp. Jamf does not publish a per-device rate; the figure quoted above is a budgeting estimate to confirm at signup.
Not sure where your gaps are?
Book a free discovery call. We'll look at what you have today and tell you honestly what's worth fixing first.
Book a Free Discovery Call