Ask the office manager at almost any small business in Melbourne or Viera where the company's email and files are backed up, and you'll hear the same answer: "It's all in Microsoft 365, so Microsoft has it." It's the most common wrong assumption we run into in Brevard County offices. Microsoft keeps the service running. Keeping your data is your job.
The gap usually stays hidden until someone needs the mailbox of an employee who left in the spring, or a folder of closing documents that was deleted four months ago. Year-end is when those requests show up, and by then the data is often gone.
Does Microsoft 365 Back Up My Data?
Not in the way most owners mean it. Microsoft copies your data between its own data centers so a failed server or a regional outage doesn't take your email down. That protects Microsoft's side of the deal. It doesn't give you a separate, dated copy you can go back to after someone deletes, overwrites or encrypts a file.
Microsoft calls this the shared responsibility model. In plain English:
- Microsoft is responsible for the data centers, the servers, the software and keeping the service online.
- You are responsible for your data, your user accounts, who has access, and getting that data back if it's lost.
Microsoft's own services agreement recommends that you regularly back up your content with a third-party service. Almost nobody reads that line. If you're still deciding on the platform itself, our earlier post on whether Microsoft 365 is worth it for a Brevard County small business covers the setup side. This post is about what happens after you're on it.
What Happens When a Mailbox or SharePoint Library Gets Deleted
Microsoft 365 has recycle bins and retention windows. They work well for the mistake you catch the same week. They also run out, and the defaults are shorter than most people think:
- Deleted email: recoverable for 14 days by default after it leaves Deleted Items, and 30 days at most if an admin extends it.
- A deleted user's mailbox: about 30 days after the account is removed. After that it's permanently gone.
- SharePoint and OneDrive files: 93 days in the recycle bin, counted from the day they were deleted.
- A former employee's OneDrive: 30 days by default after the account is deleted.
Here's how that plays out locally. A title office in downtown Melbourne removes a closer's license in June to stop paying for it. It has until about July to realize it still needed that mailbox. An engineering firm in the L3Harris corridor in Palm Bay loses a project library to an accidental delete over the summer and finds out in the fall, after the 93 days are up. A medical practice along the Viera hospital corridor gets a records request for correspondence from a staff member who left eight months ago.
Retention policies can stretch some of these windows on certain plans. They're built for compliance, they have to be set up ahead of time, and they won't put a whole mailbox or library back the way it looked last Tuesday.
How Ransomware Gets From One Laptop Into OneDrive
OneDrive sync does exactly what it's told. Someone opens a bad attachment, ransomware encrypts the files on that laptop, and the sync client sees a few thousand changed files and uploads every one of them. Within minutes the cloud copy is encrypted too, along with any shared SharePoint library that PC was syncing.
Microsoft does include version history and a Files Restore feature that can roll OneDrive back up to 30 days. It helps, but it depends on someone catching the problem in time, and it does nothing for mailboxes. Good cybersecurity for a small business lowers the odds of that email getting opened. A backup that sits outside your Microsoft account is what gets you back to work when it does. It's also one piece of a full disaster recovery plan.
Looking for reliable IT support in Brevard County? The Electpros serve Melbourne, Palm Bay, Viera, Titusville, and the entire Space Coast with same-day availability. Call (321) 655-PROS or book a free consultation at theelectpros.com.
What a Microsoft 365 Backup Covers and What It Costs
A third-party Microsoft 365 backup makes its own copy of your data, stores it outside your Microsoft account, and usually runs several times a day. You choose how long to keep it. A good one covers four things:
- Exchange Online: mail, calendars, contacts and shared mailboxes.
- OneDrive: every user's files, including people who have left.
- SharePoint: sites and document libraries.
- Teams: chat and channel conversations, plus the files shared in them.
For most small offices the cost runs roughly $3 to $6 per user per month, depending on storage and how long you keep the copies. A 12-person office is looking at about $36 to $72 a month. Many services also keep a departed employee's mailbox in the backup after you drop the license, which often pays for a good part of it.
The Monthly Test Restore That Proves the Backup Is Real
A backup nobody has restored from is a guess. Once a month, pick one email and one file or folder, restore them to a separate location, open them, and write down how long it took. While you're in there, confirm that new hires were added to the backup and that no jobs have been failing quietly. It takes about ten minutes.
It's also the task that gets skipped first when the office is busy. With managed IT services, the backup, the monitoring and the test restore run on a schedule whether anyone in the office remembers or not.
Ask one question in your office this week: if a mailbox was deleted 45 days ago, could we get it back today? If the answer is "I think so," find out before the books close. The Electpros set up and monitor Microsoft 365 backup for offices in Melbourne, Viera, Palm Bay and across the Space Coast. Call (321) 655-PROS or book a free consultation.