Help - Office 365 Backup Policy

vgeyyer2245 

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.