Do Microsoft Forms get backed up to the cloud?

[Erica Gorman]

Do Forms get backed up to the cloud and if so what is the retention timeline and how do your restore them?

[#2]

Hi, we use Barracuda O365 cloud to cloud backup and they told us recently there is no way to back up forms. So make sure any decent individual forms are transferred to group ownership and have users that are leaving export the results at the very least. I can't believe it but you do lose everything a user created in forms if you delete them :(

[#3]

@notesguru99 "I can't believe it but you do lose everything a user created in forms if you delete them" which is why in my company all survey and form responses are always saved automatically to a list in SharePoint via a flow in Power Automate. It's very easy to do, allows us to send back a nicely-formatted email with the logo and any other relevant information, and it provides an audit trail and long-term repository for the responses even if the form later gets deleted.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#4]

@RobElliott  thanks for the response, we do this already but only for our support desk feedback forms, so do you create a new flow each time a survey is created and save to a separate SharePoint list?  How do you keep up with all the new forms - we have folk creating content all the time - or is there a 'catch all' flow ?  

Thanks

[#5]

@notesguru99 yes we create a new flow or, more usually, do a Save As on a previous one and adjust it. And it gets saved to a list on the most appropriate site normally using the Create a list from another list option in SharePoint.  But with 60,000 staff who have a range of abilities and experience from expert to little we cannot enforce the use of a flow and a SharePoint list when they are creating a form, other than in my own IT business unit where it's mandatory. We do however recommend it for others and most do it. I do the training and we make clear to staff that Forms is the most unreliable of all the Office 365 apps, has no way to restore a form or responses and - as you'll have seen on this forum - people regularly seem to lose responses or forms, not that it has ever happened to me. So we try to do what we can to mitigate that sort of problem.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#6]

@RobElliott  thanks again for the advice, I will get a notice out to staff to get in touch about the flow and list setup.