A common misconception among customers who have purchased Office 365 is that they do not need to make backups. Surely it should be the case that via cloud services you get the storage in the cloud and Microsoft has a high level of IT security? Microsoft obviously has high data security and protects its servers from data loss by storing copies in different geographical locations. As a Swedish customer, you normally have your data stored in Ireland and the Netherlands. These servers are also backed up, but they are not for customers but to protect internal IT operations in case of a disaster. Therefore, it is important that you as an Office 365 customer understand how it works and below we have tried to explain this.
Backup is necessary even for Office 365
Documents deleted in OneDrive or SharePoint are placed in the service’s recycle bin, which provides a form of short-term backup or storage of deleted files. The recycle bin is managed by the account holder and files can be restored on their own. Normally, files remain in the website recycle bin for 30 days. After 30 days, or if files in the recycle bin are deleted, they will be placed in a second recycle bin, the website collection recycle bin. From here, the administrator can retrieve the file if necessary. Files remain in both recycle bins for 93 days in total. After that time, there is no protection for corrupted files or the ability to recover files. Office 365 also has version management, which means that you can restore previous versions of documents, but even here there is a limit of 90 days on average. You cannot restore documents further back than that. It is important to check that version management is activated.
If a customer is affected by a cryptovirus on their device, the encrypted files will be synced online the next time you connect to the cloud. Office 365 normally allows you to restore documents to previous versions, but some cryptoviruses rename the file names, which means that this is not possible. In that case, a traditional backup is the only solution. The same applies if your company needs to back up for more than about 90 days – which pretty much everyone does. If your company does not already have a backup of Office 365, you need to add a backup service as soon as possible.
Contact our sales department at sales@storegate.se and we will help you find the right solution for your business. We also have a wide network of dealers who can help on site.
