In speaking with clients and prospects alike, there seems to be a misunderstanding around how backups work when using Azure to host your servers or when storing your documents in OneDrive. There appears to be a belief that by simply housing your information in one of these locations, the data will be backed up by default when in reality, the truth lies somewhere in between.
When using cloud services like Microsoft Azure and OneDrive, understanding how your data is backed up by default is crucial for ensuring the safety and availability of your information. Both of these platforms offer robust storage and redundancy features, but it’s important to know what is automatically backed up, what isn’t, and how long these backups are retained to ensure you are saving your data properly.
Default Backup in Azure
Azure Backup Services:
- Azure Virtual Machines: Azure does not automatically back up virtual machines (VMs) unless you configure Azure Backup. Azure Backup is a service that provides backups for Azure VMs, SQL databases, and other workloads. This is an add-on feature that, once configured, allows you to automate backups and set retention policies.
- Blob Storage: For Azure Blob Storage, which is often used for storing unstructured data like images, videos, and documents, Microsoft provides data redundancy options like Locally Redundant Storage (LRS), Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS), and others. However, these redundancy options are not the same as backups; they are designed to protect against hardware failures and ensure data availability but do not protect against accidental deletion or corruption.
- Backup Retention: The default retention period for backups in Azure depends on the policy you set. You can configure daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backup retention, with the flexibility to retain data for up to 99 years.
Default Backup in OneDrive
- File Versioning and Recycle Bin: OneDrive provides file versioning, which automatically saves previous versions of files for a certain period, allowing you to recover earlier versions if needed. Additionally, OneDrive includes a Recycle Bin where deleted files are stored for 30 days by default before being permanently removed. This is useful for recovering accidentally deleted files.
- Not a Full Backup Solution: While OneDrive does offer some data protection through versioning and the Recycle Bin, it is not a full backup solution. For comprehensive data protection, including protection against data corruption, ransomware, or malicious deletion, it is advisable to use third-party backup solutions that specifically back up OneDrive data. ThrottleNet includes third-party backup solutions for both OneDrive and Google Drive thus ensuring your data is always accessible and available.
- Default Retention Periods: As mentioned, files in the Recycle Bin are retained for 30 days by default. After this period, they are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. For file versions, the retention period varies depending on your OneDrive plan and settings, but generally, multiple versions are kept for at least 30 days.
In summary, while both Azure and OneDrive offer some level of data protection, neither automatically provides a full backup solution by default. Azure requires configuration of specific backup services for VMs and other resources, while OneDrive offers basic versioning and a Recycle Bin but does not protect against all types of data loss.
For organizations and individuals who need comprehensive data backup and retention, implementing additional backup solutions is recommended to ensure data is fully protected and recoverable over extended periods.
