Forum Discussion
Help - Office 365 Backup Policy
You're going to have user errors whether you have backups or not. The only antidote for user error is training and education so that people understand the applications they work with whether it is email, Planner, Teams, or SharePoint. In cases of misfiled email, a simple search should be enough to find the missing message. At least, that's what I do.
As to complicated folder structures, there's no doubt that people can overcomplicate their lives and create nested folder upon nested folder. This replicates the approach taken with paper documents and is what happened in the early days of email right up to the point where search functionality became reliable enough to eliminate the need for many folders (some of which held just a few folders). It is my observation today that most users today are "pilers" rather than "filers"; the trend appears to be towards using small numbers of folders and depending on search to find information when it's needed. I would dissuade people from using complicated folder structures whenever possible.
Of course bad things could happen in the future. But the same could happen with or without a backup in place. One challenge people often forget is the restore location. Let's assume that Office 365 has a catastrophic outage and a multi-datacenter region is taken offline. This would mean that two separate datacenters are out of action in country-level regions or four in larger regions. For instance, in EMEA, the datacenters in Dublin, Helsinki, Vienna, and Amsterdam would all have to be inaccessible. You will have to put your own probability on that happening...
You have a backup. Or do you? First, can you get to the online copy? Some backup vendors use Azure as a backup location. If the Office 365 datacenters are down, there's a fair chance that the Azure data is inaccessible too. But let's assume that the backup is in Azure in a different region or datacenter. The next question is where do you restore the data to in such a way that it is useful to end users? On-premises servers? Do you have any? And can the backups be restore there? And how quickly can this be done? To another Office 365 region? Probably not... To another cloud platform? Maybe, but maybe not, and certainly not fast.
I have my doubts about the notion of RPO in a cloud environment. My point about Office 365 and its large number of users is simply that the platform seems to be doing well at serving such a load with the facilities like Native Data Protection in place. It's reasonable to assume that Office 365 would not have this success had large numbers of users experienced problems with losing data...
TonyRedmond, thanks again for your reply! "It's reasonable to assume that Office 365 would not have this success had large numbers of users experienced problems with losing data..." - well, I think success might be direct effect by great job Microsoft is doing promoting the platform and getting users on (ie. work of Marketing and other non-technical departments). I highly agree with the point "even if you have a backup - where do you restore it?". That's opening up a bigger topic than just a backup. De-prioritizing the on-prem Exchange (with promotion of Exchange Online), seems like not be the best strategic direction in my opinion, b/c direct cause of this is putting "all eggs in one bucket" (even though it's very well secured, protected and distributed across the planet bucket) and elimination of subject matter experts in Exchange (and IT overall) from the work force. When (if?) Exchange Online happen to have a hiccup that IT professionals of the customers would need to be involved to get a resolution, they will likely not be available.... and even if some customers would still have SMEs in the work force (or access to consultants), they will not have tools (like no native backups, or 3rd party backups nowhere to restore to).
What is probability that some of Exchange Online databases will become "dial tone" databases in case of disaster? If this probability is anything, but zero, customers may face empty mailboxes.
Would be nice to see:
- more support of 3rd party backup solutions in Exchange Online with clear way to restore
- "Azure Stack"-like solution for Exchange Online
- re-think the approach to on-prem Exchange: on-prem Exchange can play nicely with Exchange Online and complement Exchange Online in some use cases (at the end of the day improving and beefing up an Exchange Online offering)
As far as the probability of taking more than one data centers down as catastrophic event, I was not talking about this type of failure. I was talking about user error that caused the user to request you to restore mailbox "as it was at <point in time in the past>". It does not include any problems with Exchange Online. And by the way, the way to recover with the user error for the single user was to restore mailbox from the backup to PST. No question, that PST is not the good target for backup, but it can be a good target for restore to single user.
I do not have a backup now for Exchange Online. I regret not having one, and regret not having a way to keep the business running with email, if Exchange Online would have an issue.
- TonyRedmondAug 04, 2020MVP
There's no doubt that Microsoft has done an effective job of marketing Office 365. This has helped the platform reach its current user base, but it's also true that the worth of the platform has been demonstrated by its robustness, reliability, and security since 2011. Added to the innovation available in the cloud that can't be delivered on-premises, you get a compelling offering.
Deemphasizing on-premises Exchange was always going to happen. Customers will still be able to run on-premises Exchange for many years yet, but with a declining user base, the justification for increased engineering resources doesn't exist. Remember, Microsoft now generates > $50 billion from commercial cloud annually; that's a number big enough to justify huge engineering resources. Even in its glory days, Exchange on-premises never approached a tenth of that amount.
Many ISVs offer Exchange Online backup. Feel free to bring your ideas to them. I doubt Microsoft will change their current approach now. This is a journey they began with Exchange 2007 "log shipping", so they are kind of embedded in what they do.
I don't decry the use of a PST to recover data. Because the format is supported everywhere., it is still used for eDiscovery. So in your situation, had you recovered data from a mailbox for a user with a content search, you would have exported it to a PST and imported it back into the mailbox. This is fine; it's an appropriate use of technology. I'm just dead set against anyone advocating for PSTs as a general-purpose backup methodology for Exchange Online.