Why you should back up data in your SharePoint Online sites

In SharePoint Online, deleted items are moved to the Recycle Bin, where they are stored for 93 days. If users empty the Recycle Bin before the 93 days are up, the items are transferred to the second-stage Recycle Bin (site collection Recycle Bin), which is hidden from the end users and held there for the remainder of the 93 days. Whether the items are in the users’ Recycle Bin or the site collection Recycle Bin, they will be purged 93 days from the date of deletion and cannot be recovered by the user or the administrator.

Tip: 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 restoration any time within the 14-day window. However, there are no clauses in your SLAs with Microsoft regarding this, and there’s no guarantee you can get the deleted items back when you need them.

Limitations:

• SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business items can only be recovered before 93 days from the date of deletion. If the items are deleted from both stages of the Recycle Bin, they cannot be recovered by the administrator.
• Items that are stored in the SharePoint Online Recycle Bin count against the storage quota. When the volume of data exceeds your quota, the oldest items in the Recycle Bin are purged to make space for the new items.

Retention policies or litigation holds can be applied to entire SharePoint Online sites to prevent data deletion of any kind. Data in 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 site kept in a litigation 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. Additionally, Preservation Lock allows administrators to widen the scope of a retention policy by adding locations or extending its duration.

Limitations:

• Litigation holds are effective when coupled with a preservation lock, but enabling the lock is an irreversible action. The space used in your SharePoint Online sites can quickly build up and exceed your allocated quota, as you cannot delete any items, requiring you to purchase additional storage space.

To overcome these limitations, you can deploy a SharePoint Online backup and restoration solution. A backup solution would allow you to maintain a copy of all your files and documents in a separate location from which you can easily restore any item, no matter how long ago the item was deleted. Also, since you already have a copy of all documents in your sites, you can periodically remove the less frequently used files from your sites, ensuring you never run out of space in your SharePoint Online sites.

With a SharePoint Online backup and restoration solution like RecoveryManager Plus, you can:

• Back up all changes made to files since the previous backup cycle as a separate version so that you can restore files to any of their previous versions even if Version History is switched off in SharePoint Online.
• Restore deleted site items no matter when the deletion happened.
• Store backups of your sites within your premises or on your Azure Blob Storage and Azure file shares.
• Enable custom retention policies to automatically discard backup data when the retention period expires.