Forum Discussion
Help - Office 365 Backup Policy
Micha1735 I am amused at how the proponents of backup software always make sweeping statements without taking into account the functionality built into Office 365. If you want unlimited retention, you can apply Office 365 retention policies to SharePoint. This has a consequence for storage https://www.petri.com/how-retention-impacts-office-365-storage but no more than if you engage a third-party backup solution. And if you keep everything online inside Office 365, you have the full suite of data governance functionality available to manage the data. Third party backups have some value, but companies should always understand what's available (and they are paying for) inside Office 365 and how the available functionality can meet business goals before considering deploying a third-party solution that only complicates the overall retention/data governance picture.
Retain most of your content based on retention policies and backup your most important data because the cloud is not accessible sometimes and because you want have to access to your data irrespective of cloud provider policies and features, both now and in the future.
Dominic Horne I completely agree that retention and backup are different. However, I make the following observations:
- Having data online rather than in a third-party repository makes the data much more accessible to the organization.
- Being able to backup to a cloud repository is no guarantee that you can restore it quickly (or ever) when needed. For example, let's assume that Office 365 has an outage (which do happen). To where do you restore the SharePoint documents? An on-premises server? This question is especially pertinent when dealing with Office 365 data that has no on-premises equivalent, like Teams, Planner, and Yammer.
Again, I make the point that a third-party backup can be useful but you should fully understand the range of functionality available in Office 365 before you commit to anything that complicates your operational landscape.
TonyRedmond , with "no backup for Exchange Online" approach, how Exchange Administrator would help with following requests:
1. "I messed up my calendar and now I lost all my appointments"
2. "My Inbox does not look how it looked yesterday (or week ago, or before vacation). Where are my important emails? Can I get my Inbox restored to a way it looked 2 months ago (to PST)?" (usually after doing a good job organizing emails and moving them to folders)
That's when backup software comes to rescue.
I wish Exchange Online (and other O365 services) would have "point-in-time" restore feature.
I totally understand why it is not available, though I would struggle to agree that absence of "point-in-time" backup/restore is good.
I think you must look at things in context. First, we’ve all been using Exchange Native Data Protection since the launch of Office 365 in 2011. You don’t hear many tales of woe from Exchange Online administrators who need to recover information like the examples you cite. I certainly have never heard or experienced such incidents.
But accepting that bad things do happen in an environment as large as Office 365 (258 million paid seats at the last reported number), let’s ask how such things might come to pass. Could someone “mess up my calendar and lose all my appointments”? What steps does someone take to do this? What client are they using? I have no idea of how anyone could do such a thing. And is this a case of poor user education and training about how to use email clients?
“My inbox does not look like it did yesterday” – is that because retention policies processed the mailbox? Does someone else have access to the mailbox? Do users really want their mailbox to be restored to the way it looked 2 months ago? (I doubt it). Again, how did this happen – what steps were taken to change the mailbox and what clients were involved?
Both examples look like the kind of FUD backup vendors cheerfully throw around to try to convince people that backups are needed. When this happens, I want to know the details of what happened so that I can understand how to stop the same problem happening again. When I understand that, I’ll be able to tell you how an administrator should respond. Sometimes the solution will be found in the basic features built into Office 365; sometimes it might need external software like an online backup. It then becomes a question of whether you want to spend the money on backups to avoid a problem that might only ever occur once in a blue moon.
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business have point in time restores back to 30 days. It’s much harder to do something like this for Exchange Online because of the higher traffic (people create many more messages than they do documents) and because other applications (like Teams) use Exchange Online mailboxes to store data.
But remember that you can ensure that deleted items are kept for 30 days so that users can recover mistakes themselves. Past this point, administrators can retrieve information for users with eDiscovery searches if retention policies are used. I know that retention policies need Exchange Online Plan 2 licenses, but that’s probably a good spend to make sure that information can be retrieved if problems do occur. And above all, to avoid the need to go anywhere near PSTs.
- I agree it’s important to understand all functionality available with O365 and then evaluate backup scope and options.
Dominic Horne Yep. Which has been my entire point all along. Naturally enough, backup vendors aren't keen to recommend that people understand what they pay for (a difficult task sometimes given the rate of development inside Office 365) nor do they like people to understand the difficulty of restoring data from a cloud backup repository. Everything works swimmingly in a demo; things are different when systems fail and data is needed fast.
