Here’s “Microsoft Office 365 Backup and Recovery Policy” Guide

Microsoft Office 365 is the most popular business productivity suite worldwide. Its usage has increased from 34.3% percent to 56.3 %. Office 365 allows its users to work online, share files or spreadsheets, and work from their home or mobile devices. This makes it the perfect cloud solution for a business of any size.

However, understanding Microsoft Office 365 Backup and Recovery Policy is crucial. This article discusses Office 365’s backup and recovery policies and options available when you lose or delete files from your Office 365 webmail account.

But, one might be interested to know – What is Microsoft Office 365 Backup and Recovery Policy? Or How does this work? Or Does Microsoft Backup Office 365?

Thus, in the first upcoming section, we are going to discuss the Office 365 backup and recovery policy and what are the options available when you have lost or deleted files from the Office 365 webmail account.

Before we move towards the Microsoft 365 backup and recovery policies first determine who is accountable for Office 365 issues in various situations, specifically when Microsoft is liable for backup/recovery, and when the responsibility falls on the customer’s end.

Microsoft’s Responsibilities vs. Customer’s Responsibilities

Microsoft’s Responsibilities	Customer’s Responsibilities
Hardware failure	Human error
Software failure (server-side)	Software errors (client-side)
Natural disasters	Malware attacks
Power outages (in data centers)	Hacker attacks
Network issues (within Microsoft’s control)	Malicious insiders
Data center security	Inadequate user access controls
Compliance with data protection regulations	Poor software patching and updates

Why Understanding Microsoft 365 Backup and Recovery is Important

It is noticeable that data security and compliance in Office 365 make users feel comfortable while using this cloud platform for small and large business purposes. Microsoft Online Services offers a solid service level agreement (SLA) with a 99.9 % uptime guarantee.

It covers application downtime’s most common causes, such as data center outages. With an endless pool of resources, Microsoft has boasted multiple data centers, located all around the world, hosting the network redundancy architecture. If there is a power outage at any data center, another can start performing.

Database Availability Group (DAG) technology from Microsoft can protect the Exchange Online Mailbox data and ensure that you can access the whole data whenever you need it. In addition, the Enterprise Office 365 packages (E3 to E5) contain data loss prevention (DLP) and eDiscovery capabilities to make sure your business stays in compliance with policies and regulations.

Moreover, Microsoft will protect itself from an incident at its data centers. Although it is not safe and secure from any other incidents:

• When users have permanently deleted their Office 365 file by mistake and then, closed that application.
• A dissatisfied employee intentionally destroyed some information that was helpful for an organization.
• Someone who gains unauthorized access to business data or deletes files.
• Office 365 Subscription plan expires

Office 365 Data Protection With Backup and Recovery Policy

Let’s discuss the process of establishing backup policies for Office 365, with a focus on using the retention policies in Exchange Online as a case study to secure cloud data in a remote working environment. 

Understanding Office 365 Retention Policy

MS Office 365 leverages Exchange Online for mail, and desktop users will have the same capacities for maintaining the backup and recovery as they did with their own on-premises Exchange backup. Now, users can move to their mailboxes, look at the “Deleted Items” folder, and then, they can check the emails they want to retrieve.

1. Check all the Deleted Items folder to display if your item is almost there;
2. You can sort every item by their type to find all the deleted files;
3. Choose the “Move” option to transfer it to the Inbox or any other folder.

You will not recover an item that has been permanently deleted from your Deleted Items folder. You will be able to search for them in the Recoverable Items folder. Furthermore, there may be some rules for saving all the Deleted Items folder. Email messages can be saved for 30 days or many more, depending on how an administrator is set up.

Additional Information- If any user wants to know how to set up archive Policy in Microsoft Outlook 365 they can refer to this article. 

Retention Policy for Deleted Items That Keeps Your Data Safe

Your all deleted items folder in Office 365 is specific to Microsoft’s default retention policy. It simply means that by default, the deleted items can be saved only for 30 days.

However, administrators can change the retention policy according to the particular account needs. Your MS Office 365 administrator can perform this by modifying the Default MRM policy.

1. Go to the Office 365 Admin;
2. Then, navigate to the Exchange admin center;
3. Select the compliance management from the menu bar;
4. Go to Edit the retention policies.

An administrator can change the Default MRM policy to protect items for 7 days, 30 days, one year, or another, depending on the company’s needs.

Source- Microsoft

How to Access and Use the Office 365 Recoverable Items Folder

The Exchange Online admin can recover the deleted files from MS Outlook 365. One thing you have to remember is that only global administrators of Microsoft Office 365 with eDiscovery permissions may have the right to retrieve deleted items from the user’s mailboxes.

First, you should enable the eDiscovery permissions. Even with the help of these permissions, Microsoft may warn that recovered items from Exchange Online Mailbox might take a while (20 to 30 minutes), depending on how many items you are attempting to recover.

Once you have deleted a single message, it can be saved in the Deleted Items folder – this is just like the Recycle Bin for MS Outlook.

But what if an item is not available anymore?

You will need to verify the Recoverable Items folder. However, this is a hidden folder in which all data resides after it has been eliminated from a Deleted Item folder.

Maximizing Data Safety with Office 365 Recoverable Items Retention Policy

However, there are a few things you must know about the Recoverable Items folder and how the data protection can work:

• You can search deleted emails in MS Outlook for 14 days by default in the Recoverable Items folder;
• Exchange Online administrator will increase this period to 30 days
• You can save emails from an Office 365 account for an unlimited period if Exchange Online administrator can enable the Litigation Hold.

Mastering Exchange Online Mailbox Litigation Hold

MS Office 365 data retention policy makes it possible for an administrator to recover emails even after 30 days. This could be very beneficial when you wish to recover the important message. Litigation Hold mode will help the users of Office 365 with legal and compliance situations.

But, it has proven the best way to save data permanently with the help of Office 365. If you must have Office 365 plans E3 and E4, an admin can set the retention policies to hold messages indefinitely using this mode.

When your account is available in Litigation Hold mode, email messages will be stored in the hidden folder known as Recoverable Items. Besides, items in the Recoverable Items folder cannot count the user’s mailbox quota.

Make sure that the Recoverable Items folder has its quota of 100GB. If the Recoverable Items folder is full, Microsoft Office will start to remove emails from this particular folder, starting with an older one. Thus, if the folder is full, hold onto your hats, you will not be able to recover your data.

You can also place a single mailbox on litigation hold or you can place all Office 365 mailbox size limits on litigation hold. There are so many options that exist on Litigation Hold such as:

• Indefinite Hold: It means that all items will never be deleted. This is a very useful mode if you want to meet eDiscovery needs.
• Query-based Hold: This means that an organization can set the hold on every item based on various parameters like keywords, sender and recipient addresses, start and end dates, and message types.
• Time-based Hold: An admin can set the period to save Office 365 items. The time duration of a hold will start from the date you receive or create the mailbox item.

How SysTools Fills the Gaps in Office 365 Data Protection

Even with these Office 365 retention policies, your data is not secured. Data can still be lost through accidental or intentional deletion by others. Here SysTools help its users to protect the their data. Its high priority steps in to safeguard your Office 365 data where these policies fall short. Our software backs up your data locally and restores it to your Office 365 account if data loss occurs

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It is designed in such a way to schedule mail backup that will automatically run in the backend. Users can also export backup emails into PST file format without any data loss using advanced filters.

Detailed Working Steps for Microsoft Office 365 Backup

Step 1. Download & Launch this tool on your computer, after selecting select source and the destination backup platform like Office 365 & Outlook.

Step 2. Enable all the required mailbox categories such as emails, contacts, calendars, and documents from the below list. Also, use the Date filter option for selective data backup based on a specific date range.

Step 3. Log in with the account details of Admin such as Admin ID and Application ID and validate it by clicking on the validate button.

Step 4. Define the desired location on your computer for saving these resulting PST files.

Step 5. Click on the desired Office 365 account and hit the Start backup button to initiate the backup process.

Bottom Line

Protecting your crucial data against data loss, file corruption, and malicious attacks is a top priority for Microsoft, and also become an integral part of Office 365 service. Thus, in this blog, we have discussed the backup and recovery policy of Microsoft Office 365 in detail. Otherwise, users can opt for the above tool. It is the best solution that helps to secure Office 365 emails and other data on your hard drive without any difficulty.

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