Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
Thanks for all your answers. Guess the best solution has yet to be created. Allthough the question stays active, my customers seem to be a lot more relaxed about backups then they should be. The customers I had in mind when asking you about this where doing manual "backups" by copying synced document libraries to a external harddrive. Now, I know this isn't the best way, but I assumed they would at least copy the files to a folder named with the backup date and this creating several weeks/months of backups. Apparently, they just copied it to the same folder, overwriting the files... :smileylol:
My biggest fear are crypto virusses, encrypting thousandths of files. As far as I know that would create a situation where you would have to use version history to set back the files manually one by one. There is no possibility to do this in one action for all files...
My biggest fear are crypto virusses, encrypting thousandths of files. As far as I know that would create a situation where you would have to use version history to set back the files manually one by one. There is no possibility to do this in one action for all files...
The crypto viruses fears me too.
I saw that in the admin panel from OneDrive there was an option to exclude files for synchronisation.
Is ithis a first start to exclude files form a crypto locker virus? When there is a list of those extensions you can make a first start.
As far as recovery in this situation you are able to recover files. In this instance it ecnrypts the files locally, they are synced and are added as an additoinal version. So you can roll back to previous version and maintain access to the data.
SharePoint libraries that don't have version control enabled could potentailly still be a target. In this sitatuion you would be forced to request a restore from Microsoft, and they would resotre the entire site (assuming you notice within a day or two that this occured). If you let it linger, and you get outside of Microsoft's 14 day backup window, you could potentially lost access to those files.
Even in an instance where something was able to delete files entirley, you still have the abiliyt to restore those. If you enable legal holds on your data - then copies are kept in hidden libraries in each site, and you have yet another avenue for data restore.
If you have enabled universal auditing (which you should do if you have not), you also can create alerts on certain data actions, such as watching for important files that may be deleted. This ensures data owners can restore files in a timely fashion.
Essentially the only scenerios I can envision where you lose data completley is if something get's a hold of a privlaged account, Remove any holds, adjust retention policies, Deletes files, purges the recycle bin, and no one notices within a 7 day period (so you are at the edge of the abilyt to get a restore from Microsoft). That alone is a lot to go thru, and you make the hurdle even larger by ensuring all your privlaged accounts have two factor auth enabled.
I am amazed that Microsoft hasn't yet come up with a backup solution for SharePoint.
You mentioned that one could files locked by ransomware by reverting to earlier versions. I didn't think there was a practical way to do this. As far as I know you have to do this one document at a time. If you have thousands, or tens of thousands, of files affected the recovery time would be too long for most companies. If I missed a way to revert multiple files at once please let me know.
Without backups the other way you can lose data completely is if someone accidentially deletes files and no-one notices for several months. We have all seen it happen and without some way to backup SharePoint files they are gone forever.
John,
thank you for feedback. Our customers have to physically own backups of their Office 365, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Office Groups, and Microsoft Teams documents for compliance, restore of certain missing files, or disaster recovery reasons. It's easy to run 3rd party tools as the Layer2 Cloud Connector as a Windows Service locally or in the customer's own Azure to automatically pull any changed file on a regular base, e.g. each hour. The effort and resource usage is very low. You can than use commercial backup tools to add the Office 365 files to the existing file server or NAS backup, or use the Windows File History to keep any changed file version separately (thats the base-practice advise in my opinion).
You can also go one step further and setup a two-way sync using the above connector. Note that this is not only for files, it's for list content (from SQL/ERP/CRM) as well.
Hoep that helps, Regards - Frank.
