Can Office 365 Emails Backup Substitute The Long-Term Third-Party Backup?

Does Office 365 Backup Your Data?

Office 365 offers most of its collaboration capabilities through OneDrive and SharePoint. However, sync issues, user error, malicious insiders, and other malicious actors can jeopardize the faculty. Microsoft offers recycle bins that have 93-day retention in both these apps. But the data becomes permanently unretrievable if a user empties them manually.

Since Microsoft Office 365 backup and recovery policy does not offer a speedy recovery, data loss becomes a primary concern for the organizations using Office 365. The retention policies are different for each application, and the data recovery process becomes long and complicated for the users.

Advantages Of Backup Office 365 Mailbox

Why must organizations have Office 365 mailbox backup? Emails are the backbone of business communication today. Organizations can securely store and transfer personal information, invoices, client data, and contracts through emails. Hence, creating Office 365 email backup becomes essential. It offers protection against following

Unintentional deletion

Users can sometimes delete crucial emails by mistake when decluttering their mailbox. A backup copy can conveniently restore an email that gets accidentally deleted.

Hardware malfunction/system crash

Everyone has come across situations when the data stored in emails, both on computers and email servers, get corrupted for no apparent reason. Office 365 backup tool offers protection against such episodes.

Malicious software

Hackers are always improvising and developing new ways to breach systems. Hence, it becomes imperative to protect the organizational network against such threats.

Steps To Create A Local Office 365 Emails Backup

Businesses using emails for communication mostly use an Exchange or IMAP account. The Exchange and IMAP servers archive the emails automatically and allow access whenever needed. Users who wish to create a local Office 365 Emails Backup can follow the below steps

1. Click on File, select Open & Export, and then Import/Export.
2. Click on Export to a file.
3. Select the option Outlook Data File (.pst)
4. Choose the mail folder which you want to back up.
5. Choose the location of the backup file.
6. Click Finish

Microsoft Office 365 Backup And Recovery Policy Is Not A Substitute For A Complete Backup And Restore Solution.

Microsoft designs its Backup And Recovery Policy so that customers cannot directly access the backed up data or quickly restore it. Hence, it becomes imperative for businesses to understand the disaster recovery options. To protect the Office 365 Exchange servers, Microsoft uses the Database Recovery Groups, which are geographically distributed. While they also perform traditional backups of the data, they only use it for internal purposes in case of catastrophic events that wipe out large amounts of data. Hence, Microsoft only offers the item-level recovery option to businesses. It safeguards the organizations in the event of deleted messages, but users cannot recover a corrupted mailbox.

Another drawback is that the Office 365 email backup does not allow users to revert the mailbox to an earlier time. Thus, the Microsoft Office 365 Backup And Recovery Policy addresses the availability and not the mailbox’s recoverability. In short, data backup and recovery is not a Microsoft specialization. Hence, businesses are solely for this.

So, Is There A Need For A Dedicated Office 365 Backup Tool?

Office 365 offers its users essential protection for dealing with unavoidable and catastrophic instances. However, it is not overall protection, and there are certain areas in which it lacks. Businesses may feel well protected by deploying Office 365 Emails Backup, but in the absence of a third-party backup tool, the restoring process can become time intensive. Also, in case of an administrative error, they can recover the data only before the retention period’s expiry.

Another reason for choosing a third-party backup tool is the 3-2-1 rule of backups. It states that individuals and organizations must create three copies of the data, including an offsite copy. And Office 365 backup policy isn’t in line with these data protection concepts.

Individuals and organizations alike realize the importance of backups because they want to have an option to restore data if they need to, to comply with the regulations, to store multiple copies of confidential data so that a single provider cannot control it, and to restore to a specific time if the mailbox gets corrupted. The Office 365 Emails Backup can address some of these requirements. And if one wants to safeguard their data holistically, a third-party service is the best bet as these services not only provide the basic functionality of backing up emails securely but also offer other additional features that don’t usually come with a primary email backup tool such as that of Office 365’s.