Event details
Background: I am a Windows 365 Business user. A month ago I bought a new licence for a more powerful machine. For some reason, auto renew wasn't set up for the payments. The licence expired on Sunday (day off). I reactivated it 27 hours later. All my data was deleted, everything, a month's worth of work lost. I contacted support, they told me your policy is that if a payment fails and a licence expires, all data will be erased in 24 hours and this CANNOT be undone. This is entirely different to your Microsoft 365 data retention policy and your Windows 365 FAQ says the policy is the same.
Question: Do you think this data retention policy is fair? Do you think any serious business could trust you to provide their cloud PCs when you will destroy their work within 24 hours over simple payment issues?
Thanks for the heads up. I recently bought a new business licence also and my renewal is also disabled. I would have expected data retention to be better than 24 hours. An expired card could be disastrous
- It has been disastrous for us. I have lost a month of server programming, this is going to set back my entire company and app release by weeks. Yes, I should have been backing up, but I was working solo in a cloud machine that IS backed up, so felt at no risk. I am devastated. and quite frankly, sickened. It's stated that the data retention policy is the same as Microsoft 365, which states that even an expedited delete request takes 3 days, active takes ~ 30, passive ~ 180, but my licence didn't auto renew (even though the card was on file) and they wiped the entire machine with no ability to recover, in just 27 hours? Even a trial account that expires has a 30 day grace period. None of this makes sense. Unfortunately, this question isn't a sexy question, so I don't expect it to be spoke about today.
- So according to the answer during the AMA, the experts all agree that the data should remain for at least 3 days if I choose to delete it, and longer if there is a commerce error, yet the phone support team are insisting that all data is deleted within 24 hours with no ability to restore. This is a major issue
- Does sound like the phone support team have got the time periods wrong - They are saying 24 hours, during AMA it was said to be 3 days. Only thing I'm not sure about is if you had auto renewal "off" (which it does seem to be set to by default....I had to turn mine on when I saw your message) then does that count as a commerce error? Because it wasn't a missed payment due to a card issue do they count this as you "cancelling" rather than it being a commerce area? If they count it as cancellation you would be past the 3 days - Hopefully somebody from the AMA team can try to help you more directly - Would be interested to know how this turns out - As far as I know there's no way to download the backups of the machine regularly to your own hardware right now - All the restore points in the world don't help if the data is deleted so quickly