O365 and backups
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@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
Who knows... but important production data is data, hosted by MS or not... it should be backed up is how I'm leaning.
Technically, backups aren't quite that important. The old adage that everything needs to be backed up doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny. Certainly 99.99% of things should be, but there is still that lingering .01%. Outside of tech, we don't back up too many things in life, we consider the cost and effort to outweigh the benefits. In IT, this still happens sometimes.
And then there is "what is a backup?" O365 is backed up. Maybe not to the degree or in the way that we'd want, but it is backed up to some degree. So at least part of the fear of not having a backup is already handled. And super reliable systems don't always need backups.
Example... a cheap, fragile system with a backup might lose data once ever 200 operational years. What if we built a system that was so reliable that without a backup it would only lose data once every 220 operational years? If the backups were accepted for the first system, they are unnecessary for the second.
We often see backups as a checkbox, but technically they are just a factor in resultant protection against data loss. If you get acceptable protection without them, they aren't needed.
I haven't tested the O365 backup software yet, but I do know that every single email and OneDrive account does not need to be backed up. Can you pick and choose?
In theory, depending on the service. But I doubt it would be worth it too often. Going that route, likely some better way for the rare high profile data.
May be true for most cases but can't discount human stupidity or maliciousness lol. Had 3 instances where critical emails were deleted and needed to be recovered. One of those was a departing employee who deleted everything in their inbox and cleared their deleted folder. It wasn't until a month afterward that this was discovered. He thought he was doing the company a favour by clearing out the space. It wasn't malicious but definitely clueless.
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@nashbrydges said in O365 and backups:
@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
Who knows... but important production data is data, hosted by MS or not... it should be backed up is how I'm leaning.
Technically, backups aren't quite that important. The old adage that everything needs to be backed up doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny. Certainly 99.99% of things should be, but there is still that lingering .01%. Outside of tech, we don't back up too many things in life, we consider the cost and effort to outweigh the benefits. In IT, this still happens sometimes.
And then there is "what is a backup?" O365 is backed up. Maybe not to the degree or in the way that we'd want, but it is backed up to some degree. So at least part of the fear of not having a backup is already handled. And super reliable systems don't always need backups.
Example... a cheap, fragile system with a backup might lose data once ever 200 operational years. What if we built a system that was so reliable that without a backup it would only lose data once every 220 operational years? If the backups were accepted for the first system, they are unnecessary for the second.
We often see backups as a checkbox, but technically they are just a factor in resultant protection against data loss. If you get acceptable protection without them, they aren't needed.
I haven't tested the O365 backup software yet, but I do know that every single email and OneDrive account does not need to be backed up. Can you pick and choose?
I don't expect permanent data loss due to a failure that bad at Microsoft, but then again, I can't guarantee it. What they have is already enough via all their current protection tiers. But if something happens at the account level leaving those tiers inaccessible or lost, then the backup will be the only way to get it back.
With Veeam, you can pick and choose what you want to backup. Either the full user, or only OneDrive + email for the user, etc. Pretty flexible.
Good to know, thanks for confirming!
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@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
Foudn this but it's two years old:
It looks like OneDrive uses SharePoint technology and is backed up.
ODfB is just part of Sharepoint
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@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
MS already has backups for that scenario
You know this for sure?
Yes
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@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
Didn't you experience permanent data loss with some O365 accounts do to licensing screw-up on their part, where a backup would have been nice?
Yes, something that I point out a lot is that backups often don't account for account level problems. MS specifically has these problems, they depend totally on their account mechanisms and if anything goes wrong there, it takes out backups, redundancy and everything else, all at once.
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@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
@obsolesce said in O365 and backups:
Didn't you experience permanent data loss with some O365 accounts do to licensing screw-up on their part, where a backup would have been nice?
Yes, something that I point out a lot is that backups often don't account for account level problems. MS specifically has these problems, they depend totally on their account mechanisms and if anything goes wrong there, it takes out backups, redundancy and everything else, all at once.
This is the main reason I would be considering an O365 backup software... the question is how likely is it to happen?
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Main reason for me to. It's like having your offsite backups stored at Bob's house, but only Bob has a key. I'd want a key, instead of having to always rely on Bob to let me in. Especially if Bob has history of messing me around.
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@carnival-boy said in O365 and backups:
Main reason for me to. It's like having your offsite backups stored at Bob's house, but only Bob has a key. I'd want a key, instead of having to always rely on Bob to let me in. Especially if Bob has history of messing me around.
This, I feel, is an analogy of the "account risk" that I mention. Yes, Bob has a backup, but if the failure is Bob leaves, Bob hates you, or Bob forgets who you are, no amount of Bob's backups matter and the risk isn't measured in hardware failure but in a lot of soft things that are hard to predict and are totally vendor and implementation specific and can't be extrapolated from industry norms.
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@nashbrydges said in O365 and backups:
May be true for most cases but can't discount human stupidity or maliciousness lol. Had 3 instances where critical emails were deleted and needed to be recovered. One of those was a departing employee who deleted everything in their inbox and cleared their deleted folder. It wasn't until a month afterward that this was discovered. He thought he was doing the company a favour by clearing out the space. It wasn't malicious but definitely clueless.
For me, that is exactly the reason you need a backup of O365.
That, and any sort of malicious activity, or MS screw up.
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@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@nashbrydges said in O365 and backups:
May be true for most cases but can't discount human stupidity or maliciousness lol. Had 3 instances where critical emails were deleted and needed to be recovered. One of those was a departing employee who deleted everything in their inbox and cleared their deleted folder. It wasn't until a month afterward that this was discovered. He thought he was doing the company a favour by clearing out the space. It wasn't malicious but definitely clueless.
For me, that is exactly the reason you need a backup of O365.
That, and any sort of malicious activity, or MS screw up.
All about putting numbers to it. It's the "real risk" of the system. But you have to determine how big that risk is and put a dollar number on it. Identifying what risks are is for the IT side of our brains, that's making a list. Evaluating that risk is for the actuary side of our brains. Take the list and put values to it to see whether they make sense to mitigate.
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@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
All about putting numbers to it. It's the "real risk" of the system. But you have to determine how big that risk is and put a dollar number on it. Identifying what risks are is for the IT side of our brains, that's making a list. Evaluating that risk is for the actuary side of our brains. Take the list and put values to it to see whether they make sense to mitigate.
For a small company, for the generally small cost of these backups, I think it's best just to do them.
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@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
All about putting numbers to it. It's the "real risk" of the system. But you have to determine how big that risk is and put a dollar number on it. Identifying what risks are is for the IT side of our brains, that's making a list. Evaluating that risk is for the actuary side of our brains. Take the list and put values to it to see whether they make sense to mitigate.
For a small company, for the generally small cost of these backups, I think it's best just to do them.
The big questions being.... how much does it cost, and how much value is being stored in email instead of somewhere else?
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Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
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@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
It's a synced (assume you mean...) clone, though.
So if you delete it and don't realize it for 30 days, it's potentially gone.
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@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
It's a synced (assume you mean...) clone, though.
So if you delete it and don't realize it for 30 days, it's potentially gone.
You are not understanding. He is talking about Outlook keeping a local OST by default.
The downside there is Outlook also only keeps about 12 months on the OST by default.
But again it is a backup/copy/WTFever that is usually more than sufficient for a SMB.
Especially if you update the defualts to ensure the entire mailbox is kept offline locally.
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@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
It's a synced (assume you mean...) clone, though.
So if you delete it and don't realize it for 30 days, it's potentially gone.
Right, but not realizing it for 30 days. You are getting more and more obtuse to find where it doesn't cover you. It's not perfect, but it's free. And between MS' backups and recovery tools, and your own protection against MS account issues, the coverage is not too shabby for the "included" options without needing to pay for something.
There are certainly cases where paying for full backups makes sense. But I think it's more then edge case than the normal case. It's anything but something you'd "just do" without evaluating as the costs are never that low. If it was nearly free, that would be one thing.
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@jaredbusch said in O365 and backups:
@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
It's a synced (assume you mean...) clone, though.
So if you delete it and don't realize it for 30 days, it's potentially gone.
You are not understanding. He is talking about Outlook keeping a local OST by default.
The downside there is Outlook also only keeps about 12 months on the OST by default.
But again it is a backup/copy/WTFever that is usually more than sufficient for a SMB.
Especially if you update the defualts to ensure the entire mailbox is kept offline locally.
Yeah if you delete it from the local copy, doesn't it also delete it from the Office365 copy?
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@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@jaredbusch said in O365 and backups:
@brrabill said in O365 and backups:
@scottalanmiller said in O365 and backups:
Keep in mind that for SMALL shops, things like Outlook or Thunderbird will prevent most disasters by keeping a close on a local device. Not going to protect against sabotage, but that's rarely what people are paying to protect against. It will protect you against account issues or whatever. And it is basically free and often done anyway.
It's a synced (assume you mean...) clone, though.
So if you delete it and don't realize it for 30 days, it's potentially gone.
You are not understanding. He is talking about Outlook keeping a local OST by default.
The downside there is Outlook also only keeps about 12 months on the OST by default.
But again it is a backup/copy/WTFever that is usually more than sufficient for a SMB.
Especially if you update the defualts to ensure the entire mailbox is kept offline locally.
Yeah if you delete it from the local copy, doesn't it also delete it from the Office365 copy?
Yes, but you can still recover from something accidentally deleted. If you delete them from there, you can go to the Recover Deleted Items system in O365 to get them.
How many layers of protection is enough?
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Let's try it another way, what is the exact scenario that you fear that you are valuing as risky enough to warrant the cost of backups? Keep it concrete, many much money (can be per user if you want) is it worth to protect again what exact risk?
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@nashbrydges said in O365 and backups:
May be true for most cases but can't discount human stupidity or maliciousness lol. Had 3 instances where critical emails were deleted and needed to be recovered. One of those was a departing employee who deleted everything in their inbox and cleared their deleted folder. It wasn't until a month afterward that this was discovered. He thought he was doing the company a favour by clearing out the space. It wasn't malicious but definitely clueless.
Good example is the one @NashBrydges mentioned above...
"May be true for most cases but can't discount human stupidity or maliciousness lol. Had 3 instances where critical emails were deleted and needed to be recovered. One of those was a departing employee who deleted everything in their inbox and cleared their deleted folder. It wasn't until a month afterward that this was discovered. He thought he was doing the company a favour by clearing out the space. It wasn't malicious but definitely clueless."
