SharePoint Online Backup Strategies: Safeguard Your Data the Right Way

SharePoint Online has completely transformed the way businesses store their data and collaborate. With this platform, it's easier to access your documents, communicate, and work simultaneously with the team from anywhere and over any device. Microsoft provides high data security against service failures; however, it doesn't guarantee protection of data against external sources. This is what Microsoft's Shared Responsibility Model suggests.

This means it is responsible for offering inconsistent data and service availability and fault tolerance. However, if you lose data to accidental/ deliberate deletion by the users, malware/ransomware, synchronization errors, etc., you're the sole responsible entity. Let's learn about efficient SharePoint Online backup strategies.

Strategies to backup SharePoint Online data

Backup SharePoint online includes sites, documents, libraries, lists, versions, permissions, templates, etc. stored within a SharePoint Online tenant. Discover the proven strategies that help in backing up SharePoint Online data to combat potential business-harming threats.

Using Recycle Bin

Every document, list, or library that is deleted, ends up in the User recycle bin. It is retained there for a period of 93 days, during which a user can easily restore the content. Once this period is over, the content (list, library, document, site, or site collection) moves to the second stage recycle bin, also known as “Site Collection recycle bin” for 93 days. To restore content from here, contact your SharePoint site administrator.

However, this process only helps in data restore, you cannot use it to backup data from SharePoint Online.

Using Version History

With the SharePoint version control, you can get back to the older versions of any document/list/library and restore them as the latest version. SharePoint Online allows you to set a limit for defining how many versions (500 by default) you want to store at any time. It also allows you to track the changes and compare two versions of a document.

It is important to note that this doesn't work if the complete document or a site is somehow deleted, and it only helps you access previous versions of the file. This means all the changes made to the most recent version that gets deleted will remain inaccessible.

Using PowerShell scripts

Another method for SharePoint backup is through the Windows PowerShell scripting. Any SharePoint administrator can help you perform regular backups by writing scripts that extract data from a SharePoint site and copy it to another location. Don't forget to consider that you'll need appropriate permissions and sound technical knowledge to execute the cmdlets.

Manual backups

For instances when you have a small amount of data, you can consider taking manual backups of the data and store it locally. Nevertheless, the issue is that the method is not just time consuming but also prone to human errors creating risks of data loss.

Risks and Challenges Associated with Native Approaches

There are no native approaches provided by Microsoft that you can rely on completely for taking backup of SharePoint Online data. These practices are not as flexible as a user might need.

With the recycle bin one can retain the data for 93 days, but you'll need to restore it to some other location before that period ends. There is no granular control over the data restored or backup plus the permissions and metadata are lost once the site or file is deleted. The process becomes complicated if you use these strategies to backup massive data from your SharePoint environment.

To ensure high performance of the backup stored, make sure to:

maintain small and multiple backups,
use incremental backups,
make multiple copies of your data stored differently
test the backup regularly

How to attain immaculate SharePoint backup?

When all the native approaches and retention policies of Microsoft do not help in storing data securely at your premises, a professional tool is all you need. Third-party tools like Kernel Migration for SharePoint help in storing a copy of your data wherever you like. The tool allows storing SharePoint Online backup locally while preserving the site structure, permissions, and metadata. Offers variety of filters to take selective data backup from your SharePoint tenant.

It also supports SharePoint Online migration to and from multiple sources and destinations, including Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint on-premises, and others.

Conclusion

Your business is under great risk if you're not implementing backup and retention policies. Relying solely on Microsoft is not the option to preserve and retain your business data for a long term. Businesses can include third-party tools like Kernel Migration for SharePoint in their backup strategies to avoid data loss or other hiccups during the process.

Make sure to timely draft your backup and recovery policies and store the backup of your data in a safe and isolated location before you experience data loss.