Does Microsoft 365 back up your data?
The question usually arrives sideways. Someone cannot find a folder, or an accountant asks for an email thread from eighteen months ago, and a director says the reassuring thing: it is all in the cloud, so it is backed up.
It is all in the cloud. That is a different sentence.
What Microsoft actually promises
Microsoft's side of the deal is availability. They keep Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive running, they hold multiple physically separate copies of the data so a dead disk in a data centre never reaches you, and they replicate between regions. That is real engineering and it is worth what you pay for it.
What it is not is a time machine. Availability protects you from Microsoft's failures. It does not protect you from yours.
The clearest evidence is that Microsoft sells a separate backup product for their own platform. A company does not build and charge for a backup service on top of something that already backs itself up. We say the same thing on our Microsoft 365 page and have done since we wrote it: retention and recycle bins are not backups.
Fourteen days. That is the number nobody knows
Here is the one to write down.
When somebody permanently deletes a message, by emptying Deleted Items or by pressing Shift and Delete, it goes to a hidden folder called Recoverable Items. Microsoft's documentation is unambiguous about how long it stays: kept there for 14 days, by default, and you can change how long items are kept, up to a maximum of 30 days.
Two things follow from that sentence and both catch people out.
The first is that fourteen days is the default, and almost every tenant we open has never been changed. It is a one-line command to move every existing mailbox to thirty, and Microsoft's own example spells it out: Set-Mailbox -Identity "Emily Maier" -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30. There is a trap even in that, which their note calls out. The command only touches mailboxes that already exist. Everybody you hire next year starts back at fourteen unless the mailbox plan is changed too.
The second is that thirty is the ceiling. Not a tier you can buy up from, not a setting hidden behind a better licence. Thirty days is the most the platform will hold a purged item for you, litigation hold aside.
A fortnight is fine for the person who deletes something and realises over lunch. It is no use at all for the invoice folder nobody misses until the auditor asks.
What happens when you delete a leaver's account
This is the expensive one, because the trigger is a routine admin job done for a sensible reason: somebody left, the licence costs money, delete the account.
Microsoft's published sequence runs like this. The account is removed, the deletion syncs to SharePoint, and a clean-up job marks the OneDrive for deletion. The default retention period is 30 days, changeable in the SharePoint admin centre. If the leaver had a manager recorded, that manager is automatically given access and emailed to say the OneDrive will be deleted at the end of the period, with a second reminder seven days before. Then the OneDrive is moved to the site collection recycle bin, where it sits for 93 days.
Read the conditions rather than the numbers. The manager only gets told if a manager was set in the directory, and in a small business that field is very often empty. If it is empty and no secondary owner was configured, Microsoft's documentation says the quiet part outright: nobody has automatic access when the user is deleted, and nobody is warned that the OneDrive is going.
Getting it back from the recycle bin is a PowerShell job rather than a button. And there is a detail worth knowing if anyone has ever mentioned legal hold to you: the recycle bin is not indexed, so searches do not find content there, which means an eDiscovery hold cannot locate it in order to hold it.
There is one more clause, and it is the harshest thing in any of these pages. An unlicensed OneDrive is archived on its ninety-third unlicensed day, and after twelve months in that unpaid archive the data might be deleted regardless of retention settings, retention policies, eDiscovery and all holds. Regardless of all holds. That is Microsoft's wording, not ours.
None of this is a reason to keep paying for a leaver's licence forever. We wrote about the seats nobody sits in precisely because that bill grows quietly. It is a reason to get the data out before you close the account, which takes about ten minutes and is the step that gets skipped.
Microsoft's own backup product, and the word list that defines it
Microsoft 365 Backup exists, it is good, and it is not a secret. If your data is already in the tenant, keeping the backup in the tenant makes restores extremely fast, and that is the whole argument for it.
The published shape, from Microsoft's overview page:
| Thing | What Microsoft publishes |
|---|---|
| Covers | SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, Exchange mailboxes |
| Recovery window | 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years. Existing policies default to 1 year |
| Restore points | Every 10 minutes for the prior fortnight, then weekly back to 52 weeks |
| Billing | $0.15 per GB per month of protected data, pay-as-you-go. Restores are free |
| If you turn it off | A 90-day grace period in which backups can still be recovered |
That price is in US dollars and it is Microsoft's, not ours. We are not reselling it and we have not converted it, because the exchange rate will have moved by the time you read this.
The thing to look hardest at is the first row. Three workloads, named. Whatever else lives in your tenant is not on that list, and for a lot of small businesses the things that are not on it are the things somebody built the company's week around. Worth knowing before you decide the problem is solved.
There is a second consideration, and it is the one that makes us hesitate to call any in-platform backup the finished answer. The copy lives inside the same tenant. If the loss you are protecting against is the tenant itself, an account compromise with administrative reach, a billing failure, a dispute, then a copy that only exists inside it is a copy you might not be able to reach. Our backup page puts it in one line: retention lives somewhere the protected environment cannot touch.
Retention is not backup, and Microsoft agrees
People conflate these constantly, usually because somebody in a meeting said the word compliance.
A retention policy stops data being destroyed before a date you set. It is designed for regulators and lawyers, and it works. A backup takes the state of a thing at a moment and lets you put that state back. One prevents loss, the other reverses it, and they are not substitutes.
You do not have to take our word for the distinction. Microsoft's backup documentation states that retention and deletion policies, and it names Purview as the example, do not affect the backup recovery window, which remains fully isolated from those policies. The two systems are built not to touch each other. That is what separate jobs looks like in an architecture diagram.
The five ways small businesses actually lose Microsoft 365 data
Not theory. These are the ones we see.
- The leaver's account gets deleted to save the licence fee. Six weeks later somebody needs a contract that only ever existed in that person's OneDrive.
- Somebody clears out their mailbox properly. Empties Deleted Items, then purges Recoverable Items because Outlook offered. Fourteen days later there is nothing to recover.
- An account gets compromised. The attacker does not just read mail, they delete it and set an inbox rule so replies never appear. You find out when a supplier chases an invoice you have no record of.
- A laptop gets ransomware and OneDrive does its job. The sync client faithfully uploads several thousand encrypted files, because that is what a sync client is for.
- A SharePoint library gets tidied up. Usually by someone helpful, usually in a quiet week, usually a month before anyone opens it again.
Only the fourth one has a decent built-in answer. Previous versions of OneDrive and SharePoint files survive an encryption event and can be rolled back, and that genuinely saves people. It saves them when somebody notices quickly, and when the volume is small enough to work through. Microsoft's own description of why they built a backup product is about recovering large volumes of content at scale, which is a polite way of saying the manual route stops being realistic somewhere around the fourth thousand file.
What to check in your own tenant this week
Five things, none of which need us.
- Find out what
RetainDeletedItemsForis set to across your mailboxes. If it says 14, that is the default and nobody has looked. - Check whether the manager field is populated in your directory. It decides who gets warned when a OneDrive is about to go.
- Check the OneDrive retention period for deleted users in the SharePoint admin centre, and whether a secondary owner has been named.
- Ask whoever looks after your IT to restore one file, one mailbox item and one site, and to tell you how long each took. Not whether it is possible. How long.
- Write down what you would do if the whole tenant were unreachable for a day. If the answer involves opening something that lives in the tenant, you have found the gap.
That last one is a disaster recovery question rather than a backup question, and they are not the same. We covered the difference in the plan behind the backups.
What we do, and what it costs
Microsoft 365 data sits inside backup and disaster recovery alongside servers and endpoints. The design principle is the one from the 3-2-1 rule: more than one copy, on more than one kind of storage, with at least one of them somewhere the thing being protected cannot reach or delete.
From our published rate card, excluding VAT. Managed backup with tested restores starts on the Professional plan at 77 per user per month. The Complete plan at 108 adds a full disaster-recovery test once a year, where we actually restore rather than describing how we would. Server management is 162 per server per month. If you want one dataset covered rather than a plan, we quote it standalone. A migration, if you are still moving in, is 77 per mailbox.
Two things we will not put in writing here. We will not name the tooling, because the right answer depends on what your tenant contains and we would rather scope it than sell you our favourite. And we will not publish a recovery time. Our backup page says we agree how much data you can afford to lose and how long you can afford to be down before we build anything, and a number invented for a blog post would contradict that on our own website.
If you want the cheap version of this conversation, our ten-question IT health check opens with the only backup question that matters: has anyone actually restored from your backups in the last six months. Most people answer not sure, and not sure is a no.
Frequently asked questions
Does Microsoft back up my Microsoft 365 data?+
Not in the sense you mean. Microsoft keeps the service available and keeps multiple physical copies of it so a failed disk in a data centre is not your problem. What it does not do by default is let you put a mailbox or a document library back to the state it was in on a particular afternoon last March. Microsoft sells a separate product for that, which tells you plainly that the base service does not include it.
How long do I have to recover a deleted email?+
Fourteen days, by default. Microsoft's own documentation is exact about it: an item permanently deleted in Outlook or Outlook on the web is moved to Recoverable Items, Deletions, and kept there for 14 days by default, and you can raise that to a maximum of 30 days. Thirty is the ceiling, not a starting point. Most tenants we look at have never been changed off fourteen, because nobody knew there was a setting.
What happens to a leaver's files when we delete their account?+
A clock starts. The OneDrive is kept for 30 days by default, their manager is given access and emailed about it, and a reminder goes out seven days before the end. After that the OneDrive moves to the site collection recycle bin for 93 days, and getting it back from there needs PowerShell rather than a button. Microsoft also note that the recycle bin is not indexed, so an eDiscovery hold cannot find anything sitting in it.
Is the recycle bin enough?+
It is enough for the accident somebody notices the same week. It is not enough for the deletion nobody notices until the year end, the compromised account that emptied a mailbox on purpose, or the site somebody removed in April that finance needed in October. The recycle bin is a short grace period with a fixed length, and it only helps when the person looking knows what is missing.
What is Microsoft 365 Backup, and should we just buy it?+
It is Microsoft's own backup product for the tenant, and it is worth knowing about. It covers SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts and Exchange mailboxes. You pick a recovery window of 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years, restore points are every 10 minutes for the first fortnight and then weekly, and billing is pay-as-you-go at 0.15 US dollars per gigabyte per month with restores free. The catch is the word list: three workloads by name, and nothing else in your tenant is on it.
Do retention policies count as a backup?+
No, and Microsoft's own documentation draws the line for you. A retention policy stops things being destroyed. A backup puts things back. They are different jobs, and the backup product's documentation says its recovery window is fully isolated from Purview retention and deletion policies, which is a fairly clear statement that one is not doing the other's work.
Will version history save us from ransomware?+
Sometimes, partly. If a laptop is encrypted and OneDrive syncs the damage up, previous versions of those files usually still exist and can be rolled back. That genuinely works. The problem is scale and timing: it works if somebody notices quickly and if the number of files is small enough to handle. Microsoft built their backup product around exactly this gap, and their own description of the problem is recovering large volumes of content at scale.
What does it cost to have you back this up?+
Managed backup with tested restores is part of the Professional plan at 77 pounds per user per month excluding VAT, and the Complete plan at 108 adds a full disaster-recovery test once a year. If you only want a specific server or dataset covered rather than a whole plan, we quote that separately. Server management is 162 per server per month. We will not quote you a recovery time in a blog post, because that number depends on how much data you have and how the environment is built, and it is agreed with you before anything is set up.