Backup for SharePoint

Microsoft 365 backs up data on a regular basis as part of a commitment to data protection activities that generally support disaster recovery situations and keep your data accessible in accordance to their uptime SLA (99.9%). However, your organization remains ultimately responsible for your data protection as these backups are not available to administrators or end users and are not intended for aiding in the quick and easy restoration of lost data. While it is possible to recover lost data via Office 365’s backups, the process will often prove tedious, costly, and detrimental to business continuity.

SharePoint / OneDRive retention policies and limitations are different between its many services & software solutions.  Furthermore, these capabilities frequently alter without prior notification to the system admin, user or business owner.  Microsoft services contain a defaultive business data retention policy which can be easily customized by the admin, IT manager, for the purpose of managing the organisation data retention period, for legal reasons, and this is carried out by constructing a chosen schedule of data retention for deleted user content. 

There are 4 places where you can define retention policies in SharePoint: Site Collection, Content Type, Document Library or Folders.

Regardless, of the IT admin’s attempt to comply with the regional data retention policies, the organisational IT department is still responsible for data protection; i.e. The need and ability to restore data which is deleted due to system error, user error, malware, and such.   

The data in SharePoint and its retention policies can be configured in a various methods, but they remain dependent on the organisational retention, and deletion needs.

The organisational data retention policies, can be determined to apply over an entire tenant or configured to affect only certain users and/or regional data locations. The organisational policies, in the same way, can be instituted across all data content types, or contained to the required specified conditions. Read more on SharePoint retention policies and how to configure them, please view: Microsoft’s Office 365 online data retention policies.  

SharePoint Online items are retained for up to 93 days from the time of deletion, from their original location. They remain in the Recycle Bin for the entire time, unless they are deleted or the Recycle Bin is emptied. SharePoint Online retains backups of all content for 14 additional days beyond actual deletion, if necessary. If content can not be restored via the Recycle Bin or Files Restore, the admin can contact Microsoft Support to request a restore any time inside the 14 day window.  But, not beyond that time period, which is why 3rd party backup is necessary.

When a system admin or user deletes items (including OneDrive for Business files) from a SharePoint site, they’re moved to the site Recycle Bin (“the first-stage Recycle Bin”), where the admin can restore them. When you delete items from a site Recycle Bin, they’re moved to the site collection Recycle Bin (“second-stage Recycle Bin”).

A SharePoint site collection admin can view & restore deleted items from the site collection Recycle Bin to their original locations. If an item is deleted, or it exceeds the retention time, it is permanently deleted, and no longer possible to restore emails, without a 3rd party backup solution.  

Office 365 accounts end up as inactive, if an employee off-boards the organisation, or is on an extended leave. The system admin, out of best-practice procedure, will remove the users account, making the data + account available up to 30 days, before it’s deleted  permanently. The organisation should have a policy in place, to decide what to do with the user license, going-forward, after a user has left, with regard to their OneDrive, email, contents, certainly before permanently deleting the user, and all the content by removing the account from the organisation. It’s the organisation responsibility, obligation to make the data safe by using a 3rd party backup, with a retention period suitable for the organisational & regional policies.  Find out more about Microsoft’s Office 365 instructions on deleting a user from your organization.

If a Microsoft O365 user account is deleted from a tenant, the system admin has a 30 day period to recover the account, and all its related data. Microsoft typically defines this period of time, as a ’soft deleted’ state, and provides instructions on a documented process by which a system admin can attempt to completely recover the specific user account.  Beyond, the 30 day’s retention period, the account is then permanently deleted (‘hard deleted’) and recovery is not possible at all, if a 3rd party backup & restore solution is not pre-activated, before recovery is necessary.

Microsft Office 365, with SharePoint Online / OneDrive, has altered the way data is stored. High availability, superb security of Microsoft’s Cloud might make the IT manager mistaken in thinking that backup is a thing of the past. The fact of the matter is, that for all companies which value their data, backup is still a must.  

You can restore a SharePoint / OneDrive using our non-destructive feature that will create a new sub-site marked “CloudAlly Restore” with a date/time stamp of the restored site. You can also select the In-Place restore option at the time of the restore to overwrite the live data with the selected backups.

Yes, you can specify the individual OneDrive URL in order to backup each OneDrive site.

Yes, you can enter specific URLs to backup individual sub-sites as needed.