The increasingly popular Microsoft 365^® (formerly Office 365^®) subscription service provides many indispensable productivity functions, but offers very limited data retention capabilities. In fact, Microsoft Services Agreement recommends that you "regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services," including by the use of third-party services. Microsoft makes it clear: all your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, photos, videos, and files of any other format that you store in your OneDrive or on SharePoint, as well as all the contacts you enter in your Outlook address book, all your incoming and outgoing email messages and attachments via Outlook (Exchange Server Online), and all the calendar invitations you send and receive via Outlook/Exchange, and, finally, all the communication you share via Teams -- all of it is your data, not Microsoft's, and it's your responsibility to keep it backed up regularly.

Businesses need to protect all of their data from accidental deletion, intentional deletion by disgruntled employees, corruption by self-replicating viruses, and attacks by international hackers. It's best to store many past versions of your files separately, in case you need to go back in time (e.g., to a version that is not encrypted by hackers demanding ransom). For your convenience, or due to regulations you must comply with, backup copies of your data should be retained for a long time, up to seven years in many scenarios. Most importantly, all these backup copies need to be stored and managed in a way that will allow you to recover your data, either in entire batches or individually, when needed, quickly and easily.

 

Cove Data Protection from Falls Church Tech Support stores your data off-site, in a secure cloud environment, so you can meet compliance and retention guidelines while knowing that your data is easily recoverable. Your data will be stored on U.S.-based servers by default.