Right off the bat, you might be wondering why I should back up data from Office 365 when it’s a cloud service. Microsoft assures you of high data availability, but the service itself has no built-in backup mechanisms. And that’s something to keep in mind.
Office 365 has two levels of recycle bins in it. The first level is user level, and data from this recycle bin can be restored directly by the user. The second level is admin and only an administrator can restore data from this level. You can have litigation hold and in-place hold set up, but that is not available in all plans, and you probably won’t activate it on all mailboxes, SharePoint sites and teams in Teams.

Why back up data in Office 365
Imagine an employee deletes something. Whether by mistake, out of ignorance or on purpose. You don’t notice it in time within the standard recycle bin period and only find out later. And then what? Without backups, you don’t have many options to recover the data.
That’s why I recommend backing up all your data even within Office 365.
How to back up data in Office 365
There are many ways to back up your Office 365 data. Microsoft now offers built-in backups for $0.15/GB/month as part of the paid preview.
Different vendors offer different backup options either directly to them in the cloud or to your own hardware at your datacenter. Veeam or Commvault are certainly among the best known. But Synology also offers interesting solutions.
If you don’t back up your data but would be interested in backing it up either practically or at least theoretically, feel free to contact me.
