Does Office 365 need to be backed up?

This may sound like a strange question but many Office365 email users assume that their email is completely safe within Office365 and can’t be lost.

This is not entirely true.

First, some interesting statistics.

Almost 1 third (32%) of companies surveyed by global Office365 partner Skykick reported some loss of data within Office 365 (email and OneDrive).

The survey showed that there were four main areas where data is lost.

Accidental deletion – 64% (simply not realising it was needed)
Malware/Viruses – 13% (malware or viruses corrupt data)
Malicious Deletion – 7% (disgruntled employee)
Software issues – 16% (problems with outlook can corrupt data)

Clearly the impact of losing data on this scale can be very costly to businesses. Especially if the data relates to clients, prospects, financial records, reports etc.

Fun fact - Hal Varian the chief economist at Google has said that between the dawn of civilisation and 2003 we only created 5 exabytes, we now create that same amount of data every two days.

How would losing your business data impact your business?

Data protection considerations

Every business should understand and be satisfied with the backups in place for their data.

Good questions to ask include;

What data do you need to protect?
Do you have a legal or compliance requirement to ensure that data is retained?
How many hours/days of data can you afford to lose?
How fast do you need data to be restored?
What is the appropriate cost of storing backups?

So what data protection/backup does Office 365 actually offer?

Microsoft does offer a basic backup feature for email and OneDrive.

Email - once you have deleted an email it can be restored within 14 days from when you deleted it.

OneDrive – once you have deleted a file from OneDrive can restore it within 180 days from when you deleted it.

After those time periods it is gone forever. Microsoft says their research shows that the average time that elapses from when data is deleted (or corrupted) to when the data loss is detected is 140 days. This means in almost all cases for email and for some cases for OneDrive the data is completely gone when the business discovers they have lost it. They cannot restore it using Microsoft’s basic inbuilt backup service.

Extend your Office365 basic backup service using AusDrive Office365 Backup

The AusDrive cloud backup service allows those using Office 365 to backup their email and OneDrive data permanently with no restrictions. This means that any email or OneDrive file that is backed up to AusDrive will be there for as long as you need it.

You can restore a deleted email months and/or years from the date you backed it up ensuring that whenever you discover it is missing it will be available to restore. All backups happen "cloud to cloud" so your PC never has to backup your data to the cloud – it simply goes from Office365 cloud storage to AusDrive cloud storage.

All backup functionality is fully supported by the AusDrive team and all data is retained within Australia.

Office365 components that can be backed up include;