Backup solution for sharepoint online?

Dear Flamur,

Thank you for your follow-up and for sharing more details about your requirements. I appreciate the importance of having reliable backup solutions, especially given the legal obligations of Swedish municipalities. I'll address each of your questions below:

1. Version History and File Corruption:
Yes, SharePoint and OneDrive's version history allows you to roll back to an older, working version of a file if it becomes corrupted. This can be especially useful for mitigating accidental overwrites or data integrity issues. Each version is stored independently, ensuring you can recover previous iterations as needed.

You can adjust the number of versions(100-99999) kept for each file or the version expiration time from library settings > versioning settings.

2. Deleted Files and Recycle Bin Management:
If a file is deleted and then removed from both stages of the recycle bin, it cannot be restored using Microsoft’s default features. To address such scenarios, there are 2 options.

1. Before file is deleted, set "retention policy"(retention label for single files) for the site as described in my upper email 3rd option. So when it is completely deleted from second-satage recycle bin, you can still find it back from "Preservation Hold Library" which keeps copies of all deleted files by retention policy, and files in this library can never be modified or deleted with active retention policy.

2. Microsoft Point in time Restoration: If you didn't set retention policy and file get permanently deleted, you have a final option that is to contact Microsoft support to help with Point in time Restoration. However, this restoration type is on the site collection level. So all the site data will be reverted with this option. And it has 14 days time limit. It can be restored back to 14 days max.

3. Retention Period Configuration:
No matter version history, or Retention policies(retention labels) can be customized to meet your needs, including setting a 30-day retention period.

4. Microsoft Purview and Licensing:
The Content Search feature in Microsoft Purview does require higher-tier licenses, typically available with E5 or equivalent add-ons. However, you do not need to assign such license for all users. As long as the user account you used to perform backup has such license to use the feature, that should be enough.

I hope this helps clarify your options!
If you found my response helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you could vote for it to help other users who might have similar questions. Should you need further assistance, feel free to reach out.

Best regards,

Community Moderator | Sophia

Hi Sophia,

thank you for the information and help 🙏

So indeed it seems you have some measures in place as backup solutions, but not pure backups as our Veeam solution today.

Regarding:

1. If we trust this feature, that would solve the small issues that may happen when users make errors. But what if a file is corrupted? Can we roll back to a older version that is working? This is very important for us given the laws we are under (Swedish Municipality).
2. Lets say a user deletes a file and then goes in to the bin and deletes it there also - how would we save that file or know that happened? As of today our IT can go in to Veeam and find yesterdays storage and restore the specific deleted file if needed which is handy.
3. Would the retantion period be able to be set to 30 days?
4. Would the purview feature require a higher license? We dont use E5 for all users, just some admins and managers etc. Most have F3 or A3/A5.

If I understand onedrive and sharepoint restoring specific files is not possible today, but a feature Microsoft is working on. Instead the whole onedrive or sharepoint is restored to any one point.

Dear Flamuren,

Thank you for reaching out regarding your concerns about SharePoint Online backups. Microsoft provides version history, retention policies, and recycle bins, and more for backup options.

Microsoft's Built-in Retention:

1) Version History:

SharePoint Online and OneDrive maintain version histories of files, allowing you to recover previous versions if needed.

2) Recycle bin:
SharePoint Online and OneDrive offer a 93-day retention period for deleted items in the first-stage and second-stage recycle bin in total.

3) Retention Policies:

You can also configure retention policies in Microsoft Purview to keep data beyond the default limits, but these are not traditional backups. It will save an original file copy in your site when the file is modified or deleted. The file copy can never be deleted unless the retention period is over or you removed the policy. Accordingly, the site also cannot be deleted with this policy. Please see more information from Learn about retention for SharePoint and OneDrive | Microsoft Learn.

4) Using Microsoft Purview Content Search for Local Backups:

• The Content Search feature in Microsoft Purview enables you to periodically export and download important content from SharePoint Online and OneDrive. You can create scheduled searches to identify critical documents and download them for local storage. This can serve as a manual backup method.
• You can use "filter" function to search for identify critical documents, which can then be downloaded for local storage.
• Learn more about setting up Content Search here.

Thank you for your time and patience, we hope you have a great day!

Sincerely,
Community Moderator | Sophia