Most of us don’t think about backing up our Email, OneDrive files or SharePoint data residing in Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud. Microsoft takes care of that… or do they?
Let’s talk first about Email.
While Microsoft does a great job in providing a secure and redundant infrastructure to host Office 365 data, they cannot help with the most common cause of data loss in Office 365: human error. With a couple of keystrokes, a critical document can be wiped out forever.
Here’s how it works: When you delete an email, it goes into your “Deleted Items” folder and will stay there, as long as you leave it alone (unless you’ve set up a rule to automatically purge email older than a certain date). If you permanently delete email (shift-delete or delete from deleted items folder), it is retained by Microsoft for 14 days, after which it is non-recoverable. There is no backup of this data that you can retrieve after this point.
What are the implications?
- Firstly, assuming you are within the 14-day recovery period, it is important to note that these deleted emails are no longer folder specific, meaning if they were deleted from different folders, they will only recover back into a single folder. For example, if you had a folder with many subfolders that you wanted to recover, good luck re-organizing that information as it won’t recover back to the folder structure you had it in.
- What if an employee permanently deletes emails or folders that they thought weren’t important, but it is later discovered (after the 14 day hold period) those emails or folders contained critical information? They are not recoverable.
- What if an employee knows they are about to be let go and permanently deletes certain critical emails or folders, which is only discovered sometime after the 14-day hold period? They are not recoverable.
- What if one or more employee’s mailbox gets corrupted? There is no capability to restore that mailbox to a version prior to the corruption occurring.
- What if an employee leaves the organization? If their mailbox is permanently deleted, but you later determine you wish to view their emails, there is no restore option.
Exchange Contacts
Exchange Online contacts are stored within the Global Address List. There is no way to restore any one of them if they are deleted accidentally or intentionally.
Exchange Calendars
Microsoft does not provide a mechanism within Office 365 to backup and restore calendars.
The Solution
To ensure the security of your cloud data, it is imperative to have a secure and reliable third-party backup and restore solution. BSC Solutions Group is now offering an affordable solution which backs up your email, calendar, contacts, OneDrive for Business files & folders plus SharePoint. And… there’s no limit on retention times.
Contact BSC today for more details.
Watch for Part 2 of this blog to learn more about OneDrive for Business and SharePoint data protection.
