Why You Must Back Up Microsoft 365 (Email, OneDrive & SharePoint)
Microsoft provides excellent uptime, redundancy, and short‑term recovery tools for Microsoft 365. That isn’t the same as a true, independent backup. To recover from problems like long‑ago deletions, ransomware, or malicious insiders, you need a dedicated backup strategy for Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
What Microsoft covers (and what that means)
- Service resiliency: Microsoft keeps the service online and replicates data to protect against hardware or datacenter failure.
- Short‑term recoveries: Recycle bins, version history, and deleted‑item recovery can undo recent mistakes.
- Compliance features: Retention policies and Legal/Litigation Holds are for governance and eDiscovery — they’re not a replacement for backup.
Bottom line: Microsoft ensures the platform runs and offers tools to help you self‑recover within limits. Full, point‑in‑time restores across long timeframes require a backup solution that you control.
Where organizations get burned
- Accidental or delayed deletions: A file or mailbox item is removed and no one notices until months later.
- Ransomware & mass sync damage: Encrypted or corrupted files sync to the cloud, overwriting good versions.
- Malicious or departing insiders: Content is purged deliberately and later needs to be restored.
- Misconfiguration: A retention or sharing setting is changed, content is lost, and recycle‑bin windows have lapsed.
- Account lifecycle: A user leaves; you later discover business‑critical data lived only in their mailbox/OneDrive.
Your options
- First‑party backup: Microsoft now offers a native Microsoft 365 backup service that provides high‑speed backup/restore for Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. It must be enabled and configured; it isn’t automatic.
- Third‑party backup: Mature platforms integrate with Microsoft 365 APIs to protect mailboxes, sites, Teams files/Chats, and more. They’re often suited for multi‑tenant, compliance‑heavy, or cross‑cloud needs.
AB Computer helps you choose what fits your size, budget, and compliance needs.
How AB Computer can help
- Risk & gap assessment: We review your current Microsoft 365 configuration, retention policies, and recovery posture.
- Strategy & design: Define RPO/RTO, choose first‑party vs. third‑party, and map what to protect.
- Implementation: Configure policies, connect workloads, and set secure access and immutability.
- Recovery playbooks: Build click‑by‑click guides for mailbox, site, and file restores.
- Testing & reporting: Run restores periodically and deliver compliance‑ready reports.
- Managed protection: Ongoing monitoring, tuning, and help on‑call when you need to recover.
Takeaway
Microsoft 365’s reliability is world‑class — but your data is still your responsibility. A dedicated backup turns “we hope it’s recoverable” into “we know it’s recoverable.”
Ready to lock this down? AB Computer can design and deploy the right Microsoft 365 backup for your organization and verify restores so you can sleep at night.