Let’s Talk About Your SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 Backup Options
Posted by Sophina Dillard
on Wednesday, 6 September 2017
0
We can all agree that one of the most bothersome plagues of the modern workplace is the deletion — accidental or otherwise — of a file that was not supposed to be deleted in the first place. Sure, it can happen to anyone, but when it happens to you, it feels like end of the world. It feels like you wasted X amount of hours working on something, only to see it get flushed down the toilet. More specific, it makes you feel like a schmuck. And when someone else does it, may divine intervention swoop in and save them, because saying that you will be upset is putting it lightly.
The problem is that at the end of the day, there’s really nothing you can do about it… or is there? As we’ll see today, when you’re working with SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 you have a couple of backup options that are there to save the day.
Your SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 Backup Options
First and foremost, the Administrator’s Recycle Bin will be your best friend. As this post explains:“Unlike PC’s Recycle Bin, SharePoint Recycle Bin can store not just files and folders. It is a catch-all place for any user-created content that was deleted. That includes documents, folders, whole document libraries, SharePoint lists and even complete sites! So in other words, whether you delete a document from a document library, an event from a calendar, task from a task list, contact from a contacts list or even the whole SharePoint Site – they will all end up in SharePoint Recycle Bin.”
source: http://www.offthecusp.com |
Another backup option that’s not really a backup option per se, you should always manage your security and permissions. For example, if a user only needs to view a file, minimize their permissions and don’t give them contribute privileges; if they do need to make edits, don’t give them full control. A similar preemptive action you can take is to set up alerts that notify you when a file is deleted. And as you can see below, the process is pretty simple:
1. Name the alert
2. Choose who to send the alert to
3. Choose a delivery method — email or text
4. Choose the ‘change type’ — in this case, it’ll be when an item is deleted
5. Edit your change type further and specify whether to filter alerts based on specific criteria — when anything changes, when someone else changes a document, when someone else changes a document created by me, or when someone else changes a document last modified by me
6. Choose when to send alerts — immediately, as a daily summary, or as a weekly summary
source: https://commons.wikimedia.org |
Final Thoughts and TL;DR
Before we had the ubiquitous cloud — when things were physical and on-premise — an accidentally deleted file could be brought back to life with the help of the IT department and the regular backups they conducted. Many still do this, but many others bypass the pains that these backups entail.Thankfully, with collaborative environments like SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365, where things are virtual and spread out everywhere, there are a couple of backup options you can make use of. We already covered these options, but if your schedule is packed and you don’t have the time for the full read, here’s the tl;dr version:
● The Recycle Bin and the secondary stage Recycle Bin will be your best friends
● Only the Administrator can access the secondary Bin
● Remember, you only have 90 days to recover files from the Bin
● Manage security and permissions and restrict what users can do
● Set up alerts to notify you when a file is deleted
● If the files are extremely important and you don’t want to take the risk, designate them as records to prevent their deletion
Best of luck!
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