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Do I need to backup Office 365?

Do I need to backup Office 365?

Recently, we have seen an increasing trend of users migrating to Office 365 , and while this offers users a beneficial range of services – long term data backup is not one of them.

It is a common misconception that data held by public cloud providers does not need to be backed up. Unfortunately, this is not the case, data held by cloud based services needs to be treated with as much care as that stored on local machines/servers.

In Office 365, any deleted files or emails will go into the recycle bin. From here yes, they can be restored - but with no search function that can be a laborious job. You also have to take into account that, by default, the recycle bin will only hold this data for a set period of 30 days before it is automatically deleted, and not recoverable. This can be an issue for business in specific industries where data legally has to be retained for a certain amount of years before being erased.

Office 365 does offer some archiving tools, while this is useful to have and can help when retrieving data for an audit, it is not meant to be used as data storage or a recovery system. Additionally, these archiving tools don’t cover everything, items like calendar dates and contact information are not protected.

Information stored on SharePoint, SharePoint sites or even OneDrive is not safe against accidental (or malicious) deletion. If anything from here gets deleted, it’s gone. Having a backup of the data that is used by these applications will help protect your business from a potentially serious data loss.

Public cloud based products do not usually come with their own built-in data protection, ultimately this is the users responsibility. And if they do, it is more for short term benefits, over the longevity of other data storage and retention solutions.

So, when deciding upon a migration to such services, we would urge you to strongly consider assess the backup solutions that are available directly or via a third party.

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