Teams files - backup?

[JocelynK]

Good evening,

I am a teacher, and we are using Microsoft Teams to store, edit and share all of our school-wide documents as we think it’s brilliant, so helpful and easy to use.

However, we are not sure how these files are backed up? Upon further research, I am trying to substantiate whether these files are backed-up to One-Drive or whether they are not backed-up at all? I am aware of how Sharepoint and Teams correspond with one another, but I can’t work out whether this is synced or backed-up!

Please may somebody help me - I’m worried we will lose all of our important documents and data!

Thank you in advance!

Jocelyn

[#2]

Hi @JocelynK ,

To put it simply: SharePoint Online is the service on which many of the services in the Office 365 suite are built, including Teams: 

- All files shared in a Teams are in fact stored on the linked SharePoint site 

- All files shared in a meeting or chat are in fact stored in the OneDrive of the sharing user (OneDrive is "just" a SharePoint library)  

Microsoft does not offer data backup in SharePoint / OneDrive. In the shared responsibility model, it's up to the customer to make sure the data is protected.

In your case, you have three options: 

- Rely on SharePoint's native features: two levels of recycle garbage can with a 93-day retention period, file versioning, 30-day library restore, 14-day SharePoint site restore

- Use the native retention mechanisms to force file retention within the platform

- Invest in a third party tool that will allow you to retain copies of files (only if the above mechanisms do not meet your needs)

I have described the different native features in more detail in one article: https://www.thijoubert.com/2021-06/Backup/ (I wrote it in French...)

The native features do not cover everything, but already a very large number of use cases

Hope this helps! 

[#3]

Hello,

All of the file in Teams channel are saved on SharePoint site, only your 1:1 or group chat history are saved to OneDrive.

[#4]

@thijoubertold  Hi, and thanks for your informative answer. We live in rural South Africa where Internet is not guaranteed. What third party tools should we consider in order to maintain a local copy of the SharePoint data?

I had an instance today where I needed critically important data stored in Teams, and had to wait an hour for the Internet to come back.
Internet here can be offline for days....

The critical data is sored in each Channel's Wiki.

[#5]

@KevinTzn Hi,

Here's what I'd recommend. Within teams choose the team that you want to backup files for. Click on the files tab. To the right of the big blue [+New] button are a bunch of options. One of them is "Sync" 

Clicking that should install OneDrive (if it's not already installed) and instruct it to create a copy of this channel's files on your computer. 

If there are more than a single channel in that team then you may wish to choose the option "open in sharepoint" From there you can go up a level and sync the entire document library for that Team.

If you have multiple teams then you should repeat for each Team.

Technically this is not backup, it's just redundancy. For backup there are various 3rd party tools that can for example restore aspects of your teams how they were at a certain point in time. However if access when offline is your primary concern I think Synching to OneDrive may be all you need.

Hope this helps

Matt