Do backups for Office 365 make sense?

MVP

Vendors of backup software often focus on the data belonging to a single application. That’s OK in the world of on-premises software, but it’s an approach that does not work for Office 365 where new applications use components drawn from multiple workloads. Traditional backup and restore approach is inadequate Office 365 Groups and Office 365. The lack of appropriate APIs to stream data in and out of Office 365 is also a concern. But the real question is whether cloud backups make sense.
https://www.itunity.com/article/no-good-answers-office-365-backups-3513

4 Replies

 I have been wondering this myself.   Aside from needing a longer than 14 day retention period on deleted items does backup gain you anything.  MS garuantee the actual mailbox and SharePoint stores correct?

You cant restore a mailbox from backup, so if you have emptied the Deleted items/Recoverable items folder then its gone.

If you are worried about this for some mailboxes you can put a In-place hold on them. Not sure what MS would say if you do it for all mailboxes.

 

In sharepoint/onedrive a more fine grained restore, inside the 14 days could be useful.

You can only ask MS to restore the whole "site", think collection is the level you can order a restore on, so if you notice a deletion within 14 days but there have been new/modified documents after the RTO you need then you need to handle that difference manually.

 

But you also have the "sharepointtrashcans" to restore files from so maybe that is enough.

 

 

Hi Tony,

 

If a preservation policy is placed on O365 data (ex: SharePoint, Groups, Email, OneDrive, etc) then under what scenarios would you need to restore data? Is it only for a doomsday scenario when MSFT goes dark or how does legal hold (preservation policies) not provide a complete solution? I'm asking for a friend ;)

-Joe

 

Your friend aks good questions.

 

Assigning a retention policy to all supported locations is certainly a viable option to prevent removal of information from Office 365. Such a policy will cover Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Office 365 Groups (Outlook variety), and Skype IM conversations. It will protect part of Teams (chat records). However, it will not cover the other locations.

 

So yes, if the locations covered by retention policies (the new type as in https://www.petri.com/office-365-data-governance) are what you need to protect, your friend should be happy and never have to consider backups.

 

TR