While 25 GB might sound more than generous storage space for e-mail, especially for people who mainly send and receive text-based messages, for people who have a backlog of years of large attachments, it can get pretty cramped, which is why Backupify has introduced the FreeSpace management tool.

"As a backup provider for Google (News - Alert) Apps we have seen first-hand the incredible data accumulation within our customers' domains," said Rob May, CEO of Backupify. "We built FreeSpace to ease the burden of managing these growing accounts while still being able to preserve the valuable company data that they contain.”

Google Apps users can access the free tool and identify any large attachments and delete or download them. Administrators can see how much space their users are using and send them messages to deal with any problems if they’re close to reaching their limits.

May has an answer for anyone skeptical of a backup solution for a company that has data centers scattered around the world and offers a large amount of disk space to users for no charge.

“Successful companies often look like bad ideas at the beginning,” is one of his sayings recounted in Xconomy.

May also told Xconomy that projects like FreeSpace are an attempt to build a “data protection layer” for the Web. “Think of it as a relational data layer, not a database.”

In simpler terms, Backupify (News - Alert) is creating secure copies of data that’s hosted in cloud-based services like Gmail, allowing businesses to keep their eggs in more than one proverbial basket.

Businesses can then share this data with their partners and their customers. The ultimate aim is to show relationships and correlations in the data, which could prove quite lucrative.

In the meantime, Backupify is in a crowded field providing data management solutions, with competitors including EMC (News - Alert), Carbonite, Dropbox, Actifo, Symantec and others.