Real safety concerns at play here! Not saying 365 is not good but as long as you are not in a restore scenario fine but who can afford to be down for a week and not have email and data available? Is the risk worth it? Not sure if Microsoft truely cares about the millions of SMB keeping them fed every month.
Real questions to be raised, would not chance trusting Microsoft to be the end of it all, 3rd party backups needed outside this ecosystem guaranteed!
Thanks Falcon for providing your real world experience.
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That is another depressing
"wow!"
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The point you made at the end is most important. If your data exists in only one place, no matter if it is on your personal computer, your corporate server, or any "Cloud" service it is NOT SAFE.
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Remember 3-2-1 to have good backups
. · at LEAST 3 copies of any file,
. · at LEAST 2 different storage mediums (say on your hard drive plus at least one of the following: thumb drive, external disk drive, DVD or the cloud),
. · at LEAST 1 copy offsite—in case of fire etc! (ie the “cloud” meets this requirement, so does using a thumb drive moved to a different building, or a server in a different building)
Steve Gibson
PS: yes “correct” the plural of medium is media, but I don’t speak latin! <grin>
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Both Business and Consumer OneDrive are NOT safe enough to contain your only copy of a file. While you may have 3 copies, aka “Versions”, in OneDrive, you do not have 2 different storage media. And you cannot rely on any “backps” of OneDrive done by MS are for their internal use only. Business users do have slightly better protection than consumers, who have effectively none.
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You can do your backups manually or make use of automated tools. A strategy I have used is timed backups during the editing session (5 minute). Then the final end of day save is copied to second medium. I rotate the “second” medium with an Offsite copy. Once a week I go in and clean up the 5 minute incremental backups to keep just the end of day copy (to free up space!)
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I have used the “autohistory” tool at codeplex. It is easy to use, but like any automated process it uses up a lot of space.
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Unfortunately, although Office apps have been around since the the mid 1980’s, MS has not figured out that we need a good “Autosave” backup feature. In the past there was a “versions” feature in some office apps, but it only kept incremental copies of files, not full files. Win7 has a file “versions” feature, but it is tied into “System Recovery Points”. Not very useful. The following links tell how to setup macros that run automatically and use SAVEAS to save full copies of the file with the date/time included in the file name. You have to manually delete the “extra” backup files, but you control the process rather than Windows or Office. It is a bit more work, but I find it worth it for very important files that are changing frequently.
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Note: the relatively new OneDrive "Autosave" feature does NOT provide adequate "backup" of your files. The files and versions are all on the same system, “OneDrive” and file deletes are synchronized across devices, eliminating the “backups”. But OneDrive can be considered PART of the 3-2-1 backup system, the “offsite” part.
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You can now buy 1TB and larger "external USB" hard drives starting around US$50.
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