How to Back Up Your Office 365 Data
Losing data due to a computer problem or a hard disk crash is frustrating. You might lose family photos, your music collection, or financial data.
Office 365 backup data protection is a must, and a third-party backup solution might come in more than handy to secure your critical data. Still, in this new age, you need the best backup software for 2023.
Therefore, after you get the computer just the way you want it, it can take a long time to reconfigure your settings on a new computer:
- desktop background
- sounds
- screensavers
- wireless network configurations, etc.
Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365) is a suite of cloud-based applications and services for personal and business users.
It includes the complete Microsoft Office applications, OneDrive cloud storage, and a set of security, compliance, and storage management features for businesses.
The necessity for Office 365 backup
The Microsoft Services Agreement notes that the company aims to keep the services available. Yet, Microsoft disclaims liability for any data loss caused by service disruptions and urges that its users perform regular backups of the data they keep on Office 365.
As with any extensive system, there are numerous ways in which your Office 365 data may become compromised, varying from a user error to a service outage.
Your data in Office 365 belongs to you; Microsoft is only the custodian of it and provides access to the documents via their services. While Microsoft offers features in the 365 services (recycle bin, deleted items, etc.), they do not provide a backup service.
Before moving to the cloud, organizations would religiously backup their data; daily, weekly, monthly, and annually for those wanting extra security, maybe even hourly.
What do you need from the best Office 365 backup solution?
The feedback we have collected from our customers indicates many requests, including:
- Backup for Office 365 services
- Configurable retention
- Cloud-to-cloud storage
- Migration capabilities
- Easy management
- Search
- Advanced backup security
- Reports
You practically need a backup tool that can quickly restore your Microsoft Teams data. The mail folder contains sensitive data and cloud providers (third-party solutions) are the most reliable to perform the best backup software.
Backup tools for Office 365
What makes the best backup tool for your Office 365 data? There are many factors to this, but the main ones are:
- Automation and frequency
- Recovery speed and accuracy
- Security and compliance of a service
- Following the best backup practices
- A user-friendly, all-in-one admin panel
- Swift search
Outlook data file
Outlook data files will be created over IMAP and POP3 accounts synced by web-based email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or any personalized web account. Simply Outlook, the desktop-based email client, is used to create a backup or archive of email accounts in PST file format on the user’s local machine.
In order to select Outlook data file, the IMAP servers automatically archive needs to provide Exchange Online services as the backup file is already on the queue. Then, Exchange and IMAP servers will work in cohesion as there will be no more lost data from human error.
Conclusion
Backing up your data should never be overlooked when moving to the cloud. You own the data in the cloud, and it is your responsibility to protect it; it is only accessed through new technology and can cause problems when you need to recall information.
It also needs to be considered in line with GDPR compliance. Traditional backup solutions weren’t designed with the cloud in mind, so new backup technology that offers full support for all your applications is necessary.
My recommendation is that if you backed up your data before moving to the cloud, you should still back up your data using a tool designed specifically for this purpose, not tools developed for security and compliance, document retention, and control.
