Microsoft 365 Backup
An independent, restorable copy of your Microsoft 365 tenant — mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams — because Microsoft protects the service, not your content.
Microsoft keeps the service running. It doesn’t keep your content.
Read the shared responsibility model and it says so plainly. Microsoft is responsible for the platform: the servers, the uptime, the replication that keeps your tenant available when a disk or a data centre fails. You are responsible for your data. That replication is resilience, and resilience is not a backup — it copies whatever state your content is in, including the wrong one.
The things that actually destroy business data are ordinary. Someone deletes a SharePoint document library and nobody notices for four months. A leaver’s mailbox is removed, the retention window quietly expires, and the only copy of a contract thread goes with it. Ransomware encrypts files on a laptop, OneDrive dutifully syncs the encrypted versions upward, and the good ones age out. A compromised account clears a Teams channel on its way through. In each case the platform behaved exactly as designed, and the content is still gone.
Microsoft 365 backup closes that gap: a separate copy of your tenant, held outside Microsoft, that you can restore from on your own terms.
What a tenant backup covers
- Exchange Online mailboxes — including archive mailboxes, calendars and contacts, not just the inbox
- OneDrive for Business — every user’s files, with version history preserved
- SharePoint Online — sites, document libraries, lists and metadata, restorable as a whole site or a single file
- Microsoft Teams — the files behind each team, the channel structure, and chat where the platform allows it
- Entra ID objects — users, groups and configuration, where the backup product is able to capture them
- Task and planning data — Planner-style content, subject to what Microsoft exposes to third parties
- Point-in-time restore — recovery to how things looked on a chosen date, not just the most recent copy
- Retention you choose — a term agreed with you, rather than whatever the platform defaults to
Recycle bin, retention, legal hold, backup — four different things
People use these words as if they mean the same thing, and the difference only becomes obvious when something is missing.
The recycle bin is a short grace period for an accidental delete, and it empties itself. Retention policies stop items being permanently removed for a set time — genuinely useful, but they live inside the same tenant, and an administrator can change them. Legal hold preserves content for a dispute or investigation; it is a compliance control, and searching it is nothing like restoring a site. A backup is a copy held elsewhere, reached with separate credentials, which survives the tenant being wrong.
Who needs it most
Any business whose working life happens inside Microsoft 365, which is most of them by now. It matters most where a lost file becomes a legal or financial problem — accountancy practices holding client records, law firms with matter files in SharePoint, financial advisers and insurance brokers with record-keeping obligations, charities answerable to funders, and consultancies whose entire deliverable history sits in one document library. It matters just as much for small teams and home-workers with no in-house IT, where nobody is checking whether a deletion from months ago could still be recovered. If your firm has data-residency obligations, ask where the second copy lives before you sign anything.
Putting it in place
- Tenant review — licences, existing retention settings, how many mailboxes and sites, and how much data there is to protect
- Agree scope and retention — which workloads are covered, how far back you need to reach, and the region the copy is stored in
- Connect and seed — the backup service is authorised against your tenant, takes its first full copy, then runs to a schedule
- Set restore roles — we agree who may request a restore and who approves one, so recovery isn’t a free-for-all
- Test a real restore — we recover a mailbox item and a SharePoint file and prove the chain works before you need it
- Monitor and report — failed jobs get chased, and you can see what is protected and what isn’t
What people call us about
- A SharePoint library deleted months ago, long past every recycle bin
- A leaver’s mailbox and OneDrive purged along with the account
- Ransomware on one laptop that synced encrypted files into OneDrive for everyone
- A Teams channel emptied by a compromised account
- Files “restored” from the recycle bin with permissions and version history missing
- A request for two-year-old email, and the discovery that retention was never switched on
- A tenant inherited from a previous provider, with nobody sure what is protected
This is the tenant half of our wider backup and continuity work — that page covers servers, endpoints and on-premises data, while this one is specifically about Microsoft 365. It is also a different job from disaster recovery and failover, which is about how quickly a whole business gets working again after an outage; a tenant backup answers “can we get that back?”, not “how fast can we run?”. If the tenant itself needs tidying — licensing, sharing, admin roles — start with Microsoft 365 and cloud, then work through our guide to securing your Microsoft 365 tenant. For the principle underneath all of it, read the 3-2-1 backup rule explained.
Frequently asked questions
Doesn't Microsoft already back up Microsoft 365 for us?
Not in the way most people assume. Microsoft replicates your data across its own infrastructure so the service stays available, and it gives you recycle bins and retention settings. What it doesn't give you is an independent copy, held outside the tenant and under your control, that you can restore from after a deletion nobody spotted. Under the shared responsibility model, that part is yours.
Isn't a retention policy the same thing as a backup?
No. Retention keeps items inside the same tenant for a set period, and an administrator with the right role can change or remove it. Legal hold preserves content for a dispute, which is a compliance job rather than a recovery one. A backup is a separate copy under separate credentials — the only one of the three that still helps you if the tenant itself is compromised.
Can you restore a single email, or is it all or nothing?
Single items are the normal case. We can put one message back into a mailbox folder, return one file to a user's OneDrive, roll a document library back to how it looked on a chosen date, or rebuild a whole site. Restoring everything is rare. Restoring the one thing somebody deleted is the request we get most.
Where is our backup data actually kept?
In a region agreed with you before anything is switched on, and for UK businesses that normally means UK or EU storage. Data residency matters if you hold client records, health information, or anything covered by a contract that specifies where data may live — so we ask the question rather than accept whatever the default happens to be.
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Areas we cover
Microsoft 365 Backup across South London, Croydon and Surrey — on-site where you need it, remote everywhere.
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