Hey everybody, Jeremy here, Managing Director of The Human IT Company, and we’re talking today about data backups in cloud services. This is a topic that we get asked a lot about, and there’s also a bit of misconception around it.
See, most people think that cloud services equals automatic backups… unfortunately that’s not particularly true in the way that most people think it is or understand it. Cloud services do not protect you against, for example, accidental deletion; cloud services do not protect you if your account gets hacked and somebody goes in and starts wiping out your files or encrypting them or doing whatever. But the most common scenario is if an employee is leaving your company, and that employee decides they’re upset and they want to go out in a blaze of glory, and they decide they want to delete everything in their wake as they go out the door. Cloud services aren’t necessarily going to protect you against that.
The fine print, if you start looking at all these different services, the fine print says that they will make sure that your data is available. Now, this means that it can be accessed, not that it can be recovered in case of accidental or malicious deletion. What they mean by making sure that the data is highly available, what the cloud service providers mean, is that if one of their data centers goes offline for some reason, your data is still available from another data center. So if, you know, Joe Employee or Jane Worker decides “I’m sick and tired of my employer, I’m fed up, I don’t think I’ve been treated fairly, I’m going to quit and I’m going to make them hurt, I’m going to make them regret that they fired me”, or whatever the case might be… if somebody goes in and actually deletes stuff and then empties the deleted items folder, very often you are completely out of luck.
So what kinds of protections do exist for your cloud data? Well, with a product like Dropbox you have to do mostly a manual backup. I’m not immediately aware of any product that will automatically back up Dropbox, but of course i could easily be mistaken. And if that’s the case feel free to leave a comment in the chat because I’d actually like to know about it.
If you’re working in the Google ecosystem, the Gmail retention varies by plan and it can be as low as 30 days. Likewise with Google Drive if you delete a file from Drive then it goes into the Drive recycle bin, and then it’s only in there for 30 days before it gets wiped out. So if you notice that a file has been deleted you can recover it… if you don’t notice it, you’re kind of S.O.L.
With Office 365, if you’ve got files in OneDrive, again 30 days. SharePoint and Teams recycle bins are a little bit longer, those give you 93 days. So if you delete a SharePoint file you can still recover it for 93 days.
In order to properly protect yourself, your best bet is really to get a third-party backup tool that’s going to protect all your files, all your emails, all your OneDrive contents, all your Teams data, and do all of that, and back it up every single day or several times a day. And there are products like that which will still keep your data in Canada if you’re concerned about data privacy rules.
So if you want to know more, leave us a comment below or send us a message… come visit us at www.humanitcompany.ca or give us a shout at 604-336-8133… We’ll show you The Way IT Should Be Done. Thanks for watching.