One question I get asked from time to time is whether schools should be backing up their content in the various clouds they utilize. From an Office365 perspective, there are a number of commercial third party backup solutions available such as Spanning, Veeam and SkyKick amongst others. In terms of first party Microsoft solutions a number of options are in place that can be a combination of:
- Restore my OneDrive – a great way to restore the entire contents of a OneDrive if something like a crypto-locker attack occurred.
- Retention Policies – a powerful set of rules that can be customised for any organisation to meet their legal and security compliance around backup and retention of content in Office365.
Adding to this, an announcement yesterday has shared that Files Restore for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online is being rolled out across April and May 2019. The interface looks familar to those who have used Restore My OneDrive:
What’s really cool about this is that it is designed to be a self-service recovery tool – in other words SharePoint site (or Microsoft Teams) owners can now restore file/s from any point over the last thirty days by simply selecting the “Restore This Library” option from the cog in the top righthand corner.
Some scenarios where this would be particularly useful include:
- Accidental deletion of files by an end user
- Corruption of files
- Malware infection
- Encryption by cypto-locker attacks.
It’s worth reminding end users that the content stored in SharePoint sites and Microsoft Teams uses the same ‘backend’ storage: SharePoint Document Libraries. This means that whether you’re working with SPO or Teams you’ve got a common interface for restoring content if required.
My Thoughts:
Every organisation should create their own policy and requirements when it comes to document backup and retention and with the myriad of options available, there is generally something for every budget and security level.
This new feature, rolling out in April/May 2019, means it’s even easier for IT Admins and Site Owners to be able to manage the restoration of critical content if something has gone wrong with certain files. The visual navigation panel showing changes to documents by date will simplify the process of identifying when certain documents were last changed, speeding up the restore process.
