A deleted email and a compromised OU are not the same emergency. One needs a single thread pulled back in thirty seconds. The other needs thousands of accounts restored before the business can function again.
Too many recovery tools force both scenarios through the same slow, mailbox-by-mailbox process. Google Workspace runs five distinct workloads (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Groups, and Drive), and each one breaks differently. An accidental delete, a compromised identity, or an AI agent that hallucinated its way through a shared drive all call for a different scope, a different speed, and sometimes a different person doing the recovering.
Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) treats Google Workspace recovery as a menu, not a single button. Pick the scope that matches the damage, whether that's one email or the entire org.
Why One Recovery Option Doesn't Work for Google Workspace
Every Google Workspace incident falls somewhere on two axes: how much data is affected, and how fast it needs to come back.
RSC covers the entire range with the same platform: prioritized and mass recovery for the incidents that touch hundreds or thousands of accounts at once, self-service restore so users can fix their own mistakes without opening a ticket, and granular, item-level recovery for the everyday accidents. Here's what that looks like, starting with the options built for scale.
Prioritized Recovery: Critical Data First
Restoring thousands of mailboxes takes time, even in parallel, and not all of that data is equally urgent. Prioritized Recovery lets you define what comes back first, layering directly onto Mass Recovery (see: next section) so the most critical data lands before everything else. But that can mean different things for different Google platforms:
- For Gmail, that means emails from the last 1 to 30 days, and full calendar events.
- For Drive, it's files modified within that same 1-to-30-day window.
Once the priority slice is restored, optionally choose auto-complete to kick off the rest automatically, or manual complete to review before the remaining data comes back.
This scope works at the specific or all OU or Group level, the same options available for Mass Recovery below. The payoff: instead of everyone waiting hours or days for a single "recovery complete" milestone, the data people actually need today lands first.
Mass Recovery: Every Affected User, One Operation
Mass Recovery is the foundation Prioritized Recovery builds on. Instead of recovering users or drives one at a time, it restores Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts data for multiple users, multiple shared drives, specific OUs or Google Groups to its original location.
Self-Service Restore: Recovery Without a Ticket
Not every recovery needs an admin. Most of them, honestly, don't. Someone deleted their own file, archived the wrong thread, or accidentally deleted a calendar invite. Self-Service Restore lets end users fix those moments themselves, for Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Contacts, without ever touching admin rights.
Here's how the guardrails work: an admin creates a role scoped to exactly one permission and assigns it to SSO users or groups. Those users log into RSC via SSO, get routed straight into the self-service flow, and can search their own recoverable data by name.
Restores always land in-place, but in a new location rather than overwriting anything: new folder for Drive, new label for Gmail.
Only the latest backed-up version is available, never an arbitrary point in time, and only to the user's own account.
Both the user and the admin get notified when it's done.
Other Recovery Options
Gmail: From a Single Thread to the Whole Mailbox: Gmail recovery scales from one message to the entire mailbox, and the scope you pick determines exactly what comes back and where it lands. Here’s what this function covers:
Specific emails or threads: Search for and restore individual messages or entire conversations from a snapshot. Use this for the everyday stuff: an accidentally deleted email, or a thread someone needs back with every reply intact.
All Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts data: A full point-in-time restore of the entire workload, not just Gmail. Restore to the original user and everything lands back in its original labels and calendar. Restore to a different user and RSC creates a new calendar and a new label instead of overwriting anything. Either way, every restored item also gets tagged under a label you specify, so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
That second option is also the foundation for Mass Recovery and Prioritized Recovery, covered above. Think of it as the same restore, just running across a lot more mailboxes at once.
Calendar and Contacts: Same Snapshot, Different Granularity: Here's something most admins don't realize: Calendar and Contacts aren't separately protected. They ride along with Gmail in the same SLA Domain and the same snapshot. But when it's time to recover, each one gets its own restore granularity.
Calendar:
Specific calendars and events: Browse a calendar, drill into individual events, and filter by organizer, date, or event type. Good for pulling back a deleted meeting without touching anything else.
Full calendar restore: Comes bundled with full calendar restore, restored to the original calendar, or a newly created one if you're restoring to a different user.
Contacts:
Connection contacts: The personal address book of people a user has actually corresponded with. Restores with every field intact: name, email, phone.
Contact groups: Named collections of connection contacts. Restoring a group brings back the group and its members together.
Google Drive Files, Folders, and Entire Shared Drives: Drive recovery follows the same logic as Gmail: pick the smallest scope that fixes the problem. Here’s what you can recover:
Specific files and folders: Search or browse a snapshot and restore exactly what you need: the original location, an alternate user or shared drive, or a brand-new folder. This is the scope for the classic "I deleted the wrong folder" moment, without touching anything else in that user's Drive.
Entire shared drive: Restores a full Shared Drive from a point-in-time snapshot, to its original location or a different Shared Drive. Built for when an entire team or project drive takes the hit.
Entire Drive of a user: Restores a user's whole My Drive, to the original location or an alternate user's Drive. Useful for major data loss tied to one person, or for offboarding scenarios where you need to hand a departing employee's files to someone else.
Groups: A Protection and Recovery Boundary: In RSC, Groups aren't just an organizational convenience. They're a protection boundary. Assign an SLA Domain directly to a Group, and every member's Drive and Gmail gets covered under that one policy.
That same boundary carries into recovery. Mass Recovery, Prioritized Recovery, and even standard Drive and Gmail restores can all be scoped to a specific Google Group, so an admin can recover "everyone in Finance" or "everyone in Legal-Hold" as a single unit instead of tracking down individual accounts.
Why It Matters
Most Google Workspace recovery conversations start and end with a question: can we get it back?
But the better question is whether you can get back exactly the right data, at exactly the right scope, without every recovery running through the same three admins.
That's what a real recovery menu buys you. A deleted thread doesn't need the same operation as a compromised OU. A Finance Group doesn't need to wait behind a full-tenant restore. And a user who did a an accidental deletion shouldn't need a ticket to fix it. Rubrik covers Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Groups, and Drive with recovery options built for every point on that spectrum, so the size of the incident determines the size of the response, not the size of the platform's imagination.