What is Managed Backup, and Why is it Useful?
Microsoft’s standard Office 365 services include short-term, self-service options to recover many types of deleted items. In your Outlook email mailbox, the Recycle Bin preserves things you delete until you empty it, or your organization policies apply. Even after emptying the Recycle Bin, Deleted Item Retention can give you another 30 days to restore individual items. In your OneDrive and SharePoint file collections, the Recycle Bin feature can give you up to 90 days to restore or “undelete” individual files. For individual-item recovery that fits within the standard time frames, the standard features meet most day-to-day needs.
We’ve seen situations, however, where it’s necessary to restore an entire SharePoint library, an entire individual’s OneDrive contents, or even an entire Outlook mailbox or folder structure. Sometimes the need occurs within the standard deleted item retention period but sometimes it doesn’t.
As a best practice, we recommend supplementing Microsoft’s Recycle Bin and deleted item recovery features with a robust, automatic backup service that preserves your mailbox, SharePoint file content, and OneDrive file content for up to a year. That provides administrative bulk-restore options to help with reviewing and recovering critical data. These backups are managed via cloud services separate from Microsoft, using separate storage, so even a major event impacting Microsoft itself wouldn’t necessarily result in the loss of your independent backup data. For as critical as your email and cloud-based collaborative and reference files are to your organization, protecting that information with an appropriate backup solution just makes sense.
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