Hello clever peeps
I have been tasked with finding a definitive answer to this question, and have thus far been unsuccessful…I know you will be able to clarify it for us…
Can an Office 365 retention policy be used a suitable backup and restore system for SharePoint?
We are undergoing Digital Transformation (we’re a school academy trust group) and moving as much content to SharePoint as possible. The issue of being able to restore deleted files comes to mind. As it stands, we have applied a retention policy to all of SharePoint, which means deleted files are stored for several years.
I know nothing beats a ‘traditional’ backup, but can this model work AT ALL? I mean, if someone deleted an important file a few months ago, could we dive into the preservation library and restore it? How?
What are the pitfalls of relying on this as our means of backup? Can we remain GDPR compliant by removing data granularly as needed? Is ‘granularly‘ even a word?!
Thank you so much in advance for your time
Jonathan,
Whether you can restore or not depends on the option you choose to do with retention. Possible actions being
- Move to Recycle Bin,
- Permanent Delete,
- Transfer to another location,
- Start a workflow,
- Skip to next stage,
- Declare record,
- Delete previous drafts,
- Delete all previous versions.
Also your GDPR complaince depends on the same.
Say you choose to move to recycle bin and a user has asked to remove his data (Right to Erasure in GDPR), is it going to be easy for you to find and delete the individual’s data?
In such perspective its all about how you plan the information architecture & retention policy. For this case the best option may be a record center.
Thank you – I think I have much to learn…