Do you need to back up Office 365 data?

Geo-redundancy, which is available to users of all plans in Office 365, continuously replicates data in your Office 365 services to multiple Microsoft data centers to ensure no data is lost in case of infrastructure failures in any data center. For large-scale failures, Microsoft initiates service continuity management procedures, and users would probably not notice any disturbances due to data center failures.

So with­ such an immense data recovery model in place, is it necessary for enterprises to back up Office 365 data?­

Let’s take an objective look at the various features Microsoft provides to enhance your data protection, and also discover where they’re lacking.

The Recycle Bin in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business enables users and administrators to recover from accidental deletions. The amount of time deleted objects are stored in the Recycle Bin is the same for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, but different for Exchange Online. 

Exchange Online

In Exchange Online, when any mailbox item is deleted, the item is placed in the Recycle Bin, also called the deleted items folder or the first-stage Recycle Bin. When the Recycle Bin is emptied by the user, the items in the Recycle Bin are moved to the Recoverable Items folder, from which the administrator can still recover these items. If users permanently delete items from mailboxes using the Shift+Delete command, the items will not be stored in the deleted items folder, and will instead be placed directly in the Recoverable Items folder. By default, deleted mailbox items are stored in the Recoverable Items folder for 14 days. This period can be extended to a maximum of 30 days (calendar entries can be stored for a maximum of 120 days). 

The items in the Recoverable Items folder will be permanently purged from Office 365 servers if the deleted items have been held in the Recoverable Items folder for the duration specified by the retention policy, or if an administrator empties the items in the Recoverable Items folder.

In SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, when you delete an item, it’s moved to the Recycle Bin and held for 93 days. If users empty the Recycle Bin before 93 days, the items are transferred to the second-stage Recycle Bin (site collection Recycle Bin) and held for the remainder of the 93 days. Whether the items are in the user's Recycle Bin or the site collection Recycle Bin, it will be purged 93 days from the date of deletion and cannot be recovered by the user or the administrator.  

However, Microsoft still retains a copy of all site contents for an additional 14 days beyond the 93 days. Administrators can contact Microsoft Support to request a restore any time within the 14-day window.

Retention policies or litigation holds can be applied to entire mailboxes and sites to prevent data deletion of any kind. Data in a mailbox or on a site cannot be deleted by the user as long as the hold is in effect.

However, rogue administrators or users with privileged access can still delete items from a mailbox or site kept in hold by removing the hold, deleting the items, and then reapplying the hold. To prevent situations like this, Microsoft provides a feature called Retention Lock or Preservation Lock that ensures no one, including administrators, can turn off the retention policy or make it less restrictive. However, Preservation Lock allows administrators to widen the scope of a retention policy by adding locations or extending its duration. 

Office 365's Files Restore feature gives you the ability to rollback all files and folders in OneDrive for Business sites to a previous version. This allows you to recover from large-scale disasters like ransomware and malware attacks on your OneDrive for Business sites. 

To overcome the limitations of Microsoft's native data protection features, administrators need a robust Office 365 backup and restoration solution that offers even more.

With an Office 365 backup and restoration solution like RecoveryManager Plus, you can: