Forum Discussion
The standard backup/restore options aren't enough for SPO
Recently, a client contacted me to ask for help with a workflow that they'd been using, quite successfully, to manage a very important business process on SP Online. The workflow gathered evaluation data measuring the effectiveness of a key service their business provided, and naturally enough they wanted to retain the data for reporting purposes. The problem, though, was that the evaluation data was stored in workflow tasks... and SharePoint helpfully cleans up workflow association data and related tasks 60 days after the workflow completes. ... !!!
So 60 days after every evaluation completed, the important data that was gathered was deleted. The customer was not expert in SharePoint Online, and was simply using the tools SPO offered to provide value for their business. The rationale behind the design decisions is easy to understand, the crucial piece missing was either a deep dive into SharePoint's technical documentation or consultation with an expert before going live.
Normally, you'd think "check the Recycle Bin, we've got 93 days before it's truly deleted." However, in this case, since the deletion happens as part of the workflow cleanup job, it appears that the tasks are just deleted. Not sent to the Recycle Bin.
If this had been SharePoint Server, the behavior would have been the same, but the customer would have had more options, because they would be in possession of their data and their backups. But when we got in contact with Premier Support to see if there was a chance the data was retained in a cold storage backup or some such, we were given the standard line of site collection backups being retained for 14 days and then deleted. No options, no data, no luck.
I wanted to post this to raise awareness of the need for true backups of SP Online data, but also to ask what experiences others have had, particularly with third-party solutions. I was impressed by a demo of AvePoint's latest backup offering, and am considering suggesting it to my clients. Has anyone out there used one of these products?
3 Replies
Can't you copy tasks list to an other list using SP2010 workflow before they get deleted?
In my experience DocAve will allow for a much easier individual File restore experience and is the best backup tool. The trade off is that DocAve is probably the more expensive of the available products.
You can also take a look at Sharegate which will be a much lower cost solution and provides a good restore experience. The trade off is that the Backup experience is slow and more manual.- A Developer could easily create a backup process that export all the Tasks to another list...this process could run on a schedule and simply copy tasks as soon as the 60 day notice is being reached
We're helping the client with this, actually. As said, there are several ways this cat can be skinned, either by copying to another list or, in our case, copying the task data to an Azure database to avoid list view threshold issues and keep the data more firmly under the client's control.
But the point is that the damage has already been done, and Microsoft's backup policy does not help recover the data at all. There are gaps in MS's backup approach that would not usually be a problem on-prem. It's a downside to going online that I think people need to be more generally aware of and plan for when migrating.
