The answer is not simple. Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) is a collection of services, and the data in each service is treated differently. While Microsoft does back up data in your SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites, those backups cannot be used by the customers at will. Administrators can contact Microsoft to use those backups for restoration purposes, but there are no service-level agreements to cover this scenario so it could take a while for Microsoft to provide the data you require.
There are also no native backup features provided for Exchange Online.
However, Microsoft does provide a few features to ensure data consistency and protection. Let's take a look at the various features Microsoft provides, and discuss if those features are sufficient.
The different features provided by Microsoft are:
Geo-redundancy is not limited to particular plans and is available to all users in all Office 365 plans. Microsoft continuously replicates data in your Office 365 services to at least two geographically dispersed locations to ensure no data is lost in case of infrastructure failures in any data center. If any data center were to be offline for any reason, Microsoft initiates service continuity management procedures, and users would probably not notice any interruptions to their Office 365 services.
Unless there is a disaster of such a magnitude that multiple data centers are destroyed, your Office 365 data is safe.
While this might make you think that you do not need a separate backup solution, the gaping hole in trusting geo-redundancy for all your backup needs is that it does not protect against accidental or willful data deletion. All changes made to Office 365 data is replicated to at least one other data center. Microsoft considers all changes made to Office 365 data by users intentional, and even large-scale deletions or modifications are replicated to the other data centers, resulting in no data center retaining deleted data. You might lose valuable data if you don't have a backup on hand.
Microsoft's Recycle Bin in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business enables users and administrators to recover from accidental deletions. The amount of time for which deleted objects are stored in the Recycle Bin varies among the different Office 365 services.
When a mailbox item is deleted, the item is placed in the Recycle Bin of the user, also called the deleted items folder or the first-stage Recycle Bin. When the Recycle Bin is emptied by the user, items in the Recycle Bin are moved to the recoverable items folder. The recoverable items folder is invisible to the users and can only be accessed by administrators. By default, deleted mailbox items are stored in the recoverable items folder for 14 days, but 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 deleted from the Office 365 servers at the end of the retention period as specified by the retention policy, or if an administrator manually empties the items in the Recoverable Items folder.
While the Recycle Bin can help you avoid accidental deletions to an extent, there is one glaring limitation to it.
In SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, when you delete an item, the item is moved to the Recycle Bin and held for 93 days. If users empty the Recycle Bin before 93 days, the items are moved to the second-stage Recycle Bin (also called the 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, they will be deleted from the Office 365 servers after 93 days from the date of deletion and cannot be recovered by the user or the administrator.
While the Recycle Bin can help you protect against accidental deletions to an extent, there are some limitations to it.
However, Microsoft backs up all the contents in your SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites once every 12 hours. Microsoft retains a copy of all the 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, but there are no service-level agreement to cover this scenario, so it might take a long time for Microsoft to provide the data you require.
Retention policies or litigation holds are applicable to all Office 365 services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. Litigation holds can be applied to entire mailboxes and sites to prevent data deletion of any kind. Data in mailboxes or sites cannot be deleted by users 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 combat situations like this, Microsoft provides a feature called Retention Lock or Preservation Lock that ensures administrators cannot turn off the retention policy or make it less restrictive, and can only increase the severity or duration of the litigation holds.
While litigation holds and preservation lock can work well in tandem to ensure no data will be deleted, it adds a few other problems to the mix.
OneDrive for Business’ Files Restore feature gives you the ability to roll back 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.
Even though this feature can help you recover from most disasters to OneDrive for Business data, there are a handful of limitations.
While Microsoft offers a lot of features to ensure data continuity and protection, it’s clear that you still need to deploy a robust Office 365 backup solution to ensure your Office 365 data is always safe.
An Office 365 backup tool like RecoveryManager Plus can help you overcome all the limitations of the native methods while also adding more features to ensure even greater security.
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