Backing up Office 365

With the ever-increasing shift to working without onsite hardware to support sharing files and email, Office 365 remains the go-to product for small and medium-sized businesses.

If you’ve previously run onsite hardware to share files, such as a server or NAS then you may be aware of the need to backup these devices to protect your business from hardware failure, theft and natural disasters.

As you shift your files and email into Office 365, you may think the need for a backup disappears. But it doesn’t. Office 365 has some simple undelete style tools for the odd file you accidentally deleted or to restore to a previous version. Still, these are limited tools and are only suitable for a few last changes.

What you really want in place is a full backup of the entire shared folder system, which is automatic, at least once a day and retains up to seven years’ worth of backups (for accountancy compliance rules for example).

You want this backup to be outside of the Office 365 environment, as this will protect you from any issues with Microsoft’s services or business and protect your data should it be affected by Malware for example.

We back Office 365 up to a separate Cloud services provider in the UK (to stay compliant with data protection laws), three times a day. This means that should there be a major problem with Microsoft, we can simply download and restore the data to another provider in the interim (such as Google or Amazon for example) and off we go again.

For those of you who want your email to be fully backed up, and retained for a seven-year period, this can also be achieved using the same product and service.

Having these backup services in place protects your business, gives you peace of mind and has no impact on your day-to-day operations. They simply happen automatically, with ourselves manually checking them once a week to ensure all is well with them.

As some of our customers will acknowledge, they’ve come to the rescue when files have gone missing, but no one noticed for a few months. We were able to quickly and easily go back in time, locate them and restore them back to the live data. No fuss, no hassle.

If you would like to discuss these products for your business, please contact us on 01527 908646 or hello@lucidcomputersolutions.co.uk

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, a Redditch-based business that champions Office 365 services. This article was automatically backed up, shortly after being produced.