Do you backup office 365?

[JoeBloggs]

Simple question really.

 

I'm still hosting exchange on-prem. (private company)

 

So do you guys who are currently on o365 currently backup your environment somewhere?

 

Or just relay on Microsoft to do the backups, replicate to other data centres etc.

 

Thanks

[jonathan.lees]

Had O365 for around 5 years now and just rely on Microsoft 90 days but can also backup to pst using outlook client if needed. Can't afford any other solution sadly.

[deano3693]

Same - Just relying on Microsoft never had any issues in the many years we've been using O365.

[Norphy]

It seems silly to host email in the cloud only to pull it down on-prem for backups. I trust that MS have a decent DR plan in the event of major failure on their end.

 

Brick level backups were always unreliable with on-prem Exchange so I don’t feel I’m missing anything by not backing it up.

[3s-gtech]

Agreed, I'd imagine that MS's own systems are backed up and resilient enough, but I'd want to know for sure first. My Exchange sever is backed up, but would I trust the restore in case of total failure to actually work? No, honestly. That's one of the big appeals of going cloud for email.

[AlanD]

Had O365 for around 5 years now and just rely on Microsoft 90 days but can also backup to pst using outlook client if needed. Can't afford any other solution sadly.

 

 

As long as no safeguarding/protection/child progress is sent by email - I guess this fine....otherwise we have a duty and there is an expectation to be able to produce such information for information requests - should there be subsequently - some dispute about a child's progress and how it was handled.

 

What is isn't clear - is how long we should hold onto that information. I still often hear quoted 6 or 7 years - on the grounds that is what is required for financial data - which clearly doesn't apply - or not necessarily appropriate. And when you hear of the problems caused after the Windrush documents were destroyed without dur thought process...its not inconceivable that schools might be asked to produce records a decade or more after a child has left.

 

...by the way - not doing something because you "can't afford it" is no excuse in law. Schools do have money - but (and perhaps sensibly) choose to spend it on things other that IT....(often spending a small fortune on MIS and financial systems....sometimes when they could be done with a spreadsheet and data base almost as well).

[kennysarmy]

Sorry to resurrect an older thread, but we're likely to be migrating our Mdaeamon to Office 365 this year and are currently discussing whether the basic O365 backup/retention is good enough or if it's worth paying extra for?

 

The quote for Veeam Backup for O365 is @ £10.96 per user per year. (£1.800 per year)

[Roberto]

Sorry to resurrect an older thread, but we're likely to be migrating our Mdaeamon to Office 365 this year and are currently discussing whether the basic O365 backup/retention is good enough or if it's worth paying extra for?

 

The quote for Veeam Backup for O365 is @ £10.96 per user per year. (£1.800 per year)

 

I'd suggest that Microsoft's data protection and retention policies are targeted more at availability of the service in general and mailboxes in particular, and in the real world that's fine... but you need to make sure you understand the implications of that.

 

We're not doing any additional backups, but you really do need to decide for yourself what the risks are you're worried about and how best to mitigate them. For example, we're using Mimecast as an archival service which means we can pretty much track sent/received emails for safeguarding purposes in the event of an incident, so that reason to have a snapshot of user mailboxes at a moment in time, which might be one reason to backup mailboxes, isn't there for us.

 

In either case, I'm a little wary that lots of people who tell you that you need to back up Office 365 because "Microsoft don't back your data up" might be technically correct but are intentionally muddying the waters of how Microsoft / Google protect data because they have a product to sell.

Edited January 11, 2019 by Roberto

[TwistedHelixis]

You could look at Spanning - https://spanning.com/ - If you are a school make sure you mention you are in education as the discount is well worth it. We would not be able to use them if it was not for the education discounts as their business prices are too much for us.

 

Also, not being able to afford backup is not really an excuse, all the primary schools I look after all have cloud based backup from either office 365 or G Suite, just backup less accounts or something.

[kennysarmy]

I'd suggest that Microsoft's data protection and retention policies are targeted more at availability of the service in general and mailboxes in particular, and in the real world that's fine... but you need to make sure you understand the implications of that.

 

We're not doing any additional backups, but you really do need to decide for yourself what the risks are you're worried about and how best to mitigate them. For example, we're using Mimecast as an archival service which means we can pretty much track sent/received emails for safeguarding purposes in the event of an incident, so that reason to have a snapshot of user mailboxes at a moment in time, which might be one reason to backup mailboxes, isn't there for us.

 

In either case, I'm a little wary that lots of people who tell you that you need to back up Office 365 because "Microsoft don't back your data up" might be technically correct but are intentionally muddying the waters of how Microsoft / Google protect data because they have a product to sell.

 

Thanks.

 

Just to add our pastoral team use something called CPOMS - so all safeguarding information, tracking of incidents is done outside of our regular email.

[kennysarmy]

You could look at Spanning - https://spanning.com/ - If you are a school make sure you mention you are in education as the discount is well worth it. We would not be able to use them if it was not for the education discounts as their business prices are too much for us.

 

Also, not being able to afford backup is not really an excuse, all the primary schools I look after all have cloud based backup from either office 365 or G Suite, just backup less accounts or something.

 

Thanks.

 

Just watched this:

 

 

and I've emailed them for a quote.

[Roberto]

Thanks.

 

Just to add our pastoral team use something called CPOMS - so all safeguarding information, tracking of incidents is done outside of our regular email.

 

I'm not talking about tracking cases, sorry (though CPOMS is the right place to do this, we use it too), I'm talking about being able to validate questions over whether or not certain emails were sent or received from accounts under investigation. Currently with on-site email servers, if you get a question as to an inappropriate message being in mailbox x on date y you can restore a backup of that mailbox on that day and give a definitive answer about whether or not it was there.

Edited January 11, 2019 by Roberto

[TwistedHelixis]

Spanning backup lets you browse emails from a date, at least it does for G Suite accounts which is when I needed that function.

[Ditto]

Is this much different from what the vault offers?

[TwistedHelixis]

Is this much different from what the vault offers?

 

If you are referring to Spanning then yes its very different. It backs up email, drive, team drive, calendar, sites. You can restore those files from any point in time and even if google went poof and vanished. If all our files got encrypted or corrupted I can get those all restored with just a couple of clicks.

[chaplic]

i do o365 for FTSE companies to pay the bills and o365 for a school. none of them are externally backed up. exchange is a very mature product and the resiliency built into o365 implementation of exchange is pretty impressive. MS guidance is that its not needed. just look at the thread a few down from this

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/202700-uk-government-encourages-public-sector-organisations-use-office-365-a.html

 

assuming you have a decent amount of mailboxes and TBs of data, how and where are you going to restore and how do you test?

 

if you are worried abput your own data recovery needs, there are a pretty robust bunch to tools including litigation hold and retention rules.

[Roberto]

i do o365 for FTSE companies to pay the bills and o365 for a school. none of them are externally backed up. exchange is a very mature product and the resiliency built into o365 implementation of exchange is pretty impressive. MS guidance is that its not needed. just look at the thread a few down from this

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/202700-uk-government-encourages-public-sector-organisations-use-office-365-a.html

 

assuming you have a decent amount of mailboxes and TBs of data, how and where are you going to restore and how do you test?

 

if you are worried abput your own data recovery needs, there are a pretty robust bunch to tools including litigation hold and retention rules.

 

This is what I'm getting at. There might be specific needs to protect some data or some services beyond the service offerings, but the idea that we need to back up these services in O365 because that's what we used to do when it was on-site isn't true in my opinion. There are very good tools for service availability and data protection and resilience built in to the service.

 

But in fairness, it's a huge head-rush to truly start living that approach.

[Soulfish]

Totally agree with what @Roberto and @chaplic are saying. Running a massive O365 implementation we have PBs of email, archives and SharePoint data - there's no way we could ever hope to backup any of it.

 

Unlike most organisations we have had Microsoft restore over 0.5pb in under 12 hours so we're pretty happy with the SLAs that we have in place with them

[psydii]

What went so wrong that you needed to get .5pb restored? That's a lot of mailboxen/site collections!

 

FWIW when we needed a site rolling back just 12hrs due to some malware, it took several days for MS to get it right

[Soulfish]

What went so wrong that you needed to get .5pb restored? That's a lot of mailboxen/site collections!

 

FWIW when we needed a site rolling back just 12hrs due to some malware, it took several days for MS to get it right

 

That was a restore of our OneDrive environment; lets just say malware and if anyone is at BETT feel free to ask me about it

[ictgoodpractice]

Interesting article here

 

https://schoolsict.co.uk/what-we-do/office-365/security-and-compliance/office-365-is-my-data-safe

[smithson83]

We're looking into using Veeam for 365 mainly as a was to backup Class OneNotes.

Over the past year or so it become apparent to us that backup and version history for OneNotes doesn't work/isn't available. With every other piece of data in OneDrive/SharePoint you have the ability to back to a previous version or restore it from the two stage recycle bin, but not OneNote.

 

We have a Teams Class-OneNote for each class in school, which is a lot of potential "miss, my work has gone". If it wasn't for our large scale use of OneNotes for classes, we probably would be comfortable with the versioning and restore ability in 365.

 

Veeam doesn't look perfect, but it does give the option to restore sections from OneNotes to at least get the data back.

Edited March 18, 2020 by smithson83