I’ve been using the MS Business Productivity Online Suite for 2 months now. I’m more than happy about it, it really saved me a lot of time setting up the basic needs for my own company. For your info, I’m using Exchange (both OWA and Outlook), SharePoint Online and Live Meeting.
I’ve always beep quite serious on making backups en to ensure the availability of my data. Not that I don’t trust MS, but at minimum I think you should have a clear understanding of what you can an cannot expect from them.
Luckily there’s a very clear text in the Online Services Help concerning data Backup and Recovery. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/bpos/html/7b8f6b68-625d-4f45-98d8-b178c1f3f27d.htm
There are some interesting things in there, this is a short summary;
For Outlook you can be quite confident that your data will be available.
- Deleted items are recoverable up to 14 days old
- Corrupted items are recoverable up to 14 days old, The newest recovered item may be at least one business day old
- Deleted or corrupted mailboxes or any other disaster recovery will attempt to recover a mailbox up to 14 or 30 days after the problem occurred, the data may be at least one business day old
Now that you’re aware of this you can determine your own backup strategy. The most important thing is that Deleted and Corrupted items are recoverable up to 14 days old. This means for any item older than 14 days backup/restore is up to yourself. I choose to adjust my Auto-archive settings to archive every 14 days, and make a regular backup of the archive files.
For SharePoint things are quite different, just look at this:
- Items deleted by mistake will go through the regular Recycle Bin process, this gives you 60 days to recover a deleted item. If versioning is enabled you can also restore previous versions of documents.
- If the SharePoint site is deleted by mistake or is corrupted recovery is not supported
- In case of disaster recovery MS will attempt to recover a SharePoint site up to 14 days after a disaster. The service may take six business days to be completed. The newest recovered item may be at least seven business days old.
Especially the second item is quite concerning. I think it is strange as well if you consider that in case of disaster recovery MS will attempt to recover the site. According to the disaster recovery there are weekly backups. In practice I assume this might mean they will help you recover a deleted site, but apparently it is not guaranteed in any way.
Personally I have made some precautions to prevent data loss. As a SharePoint consultant I should be able to restore a site-template to another environment. Unluckily my site was already to large to make a site-template with content included, I think the limit is 10mb (it was in SP2003). Other option is to use SharePoint Designer, although I have not tried the restore process.
The option I’m most confident about is to simply use the Office client tools. Right now I use the following tools for the different elements in the site:
| Lists | Access (Open with Access) |
| Tasks | Outlook (Connect to Outlook) |
| Documents | Outlook (Connect to Outlook) |
The advantage of this method is that you store your data in a readable for and as a bonus you automatically have an off-line copy of it. I’ve made a scheduled task that will open the Access file once a day to allow it to retrieve the data from the BPOS site.
Overall I think backup/restore needs some more refinement and improvement, especially the SharePoint Online part. Sure, MS will use a reliable and redundant back-end, but as a client I would like to have my own physical copy of the bits (for as far as you can call a bit physical).
I’m quite interested in how you are addressing this topic, please comment your methods and opinions!
koning53