Project summary
OneDrive Data Backups
(A Cautionary tale)
Our client, a UK based charity uses Microsoft OneDrive as a core part of their business processes, using it as many of our clients do to store and share their data and files.
Having happily used a OneDrive setup for many years, unexpectedly one day, our client’s team were unable to access folders on their company OneDrive and users were no longer able to open files.
Our client reported the problem to the Brash Support team who took up the investigation on their behalf.
Company Data Inaccessible, with no data backup
The Brash team quickly identified that a main element of the OneDrive set-up was ‘missing’ (deleted) which as a result had rendered all the company’s data inaccessible. The file pathways to gain access to the company’s data no longer existed and could not be viewed or retrieved.
Because the client had no data backup processes in place for their OneDrive data (and the Microsoft OneDrive product itself does not provide a backup for the data), no other copies of the ‘lost’ company data existed.
This meant that the Brash team were not able to reinstall a previous version of the data to allow business operations to quickly resume, as would be normal practice in such a situation.
BUSINESS AS [UN]USUAL
With the information required to run the business ‘lost’ and with no ability to quickly reinstall, recreate or replace that missing data, the Client team were faced with the extremely difficult situation of working out how to continue running the business.
While the client team worked on that daunting and stressful task, the Brash team continued to work with Microsoft to try and find ways to ‘get back’ the lost pathways to the data. After a protracted period of conversations across more than three weeks, finally a piece of good news (a small miracle in fact) was received from Microsoft – a data path had been found in a Recycle bin that was now only visible to the Microsoft engineers!
But this wasn’t to be the end of the problem – having found the deleted data path, Microsoft could reinstate the data path but only at the cost of overwriting any new data created. The business had of course continued to operate during the time that a solution was being looked for and would therefore mean that all the new files and data would be overwritten when the ‘lost’ data was reinstated.
So, whilst the Brash team continued to look for a better solution with Microsoft, temporary access to the ‘lost’ data was established through a separate URL link (not through the Office 365 portal or via the OneDrive application) but which at least allowed the client team to access the files again. A small and welcome step forward but not the full data restore that the business needed.
Eventually, and a further week later, the right solution was found that allowed all the ‘lost’ data to became visible again and importantly, that could be accessed through our Client’s OneDrive account, as it was originally.
onedrive data backup - essential for all businesses
By the time the solution was in place, nearly a month had elapsed from the time our client’s data had first become inaccessible up until the point that the missing file pathways were restored, and normal business operations resumed.
For our client, the scale of the disruption to the business and financial risk caused by not having a backup solution in place for their OneDrive data was unimaginable – until it actually happened.
Our client has since installed Brash’s OneDrive Data Backup solution. This is a highly recommended and cost-effective service addition that we offer to all our customers who use OneDrive to store their company data.
Included in this service is an automated backup of your OneDrive data to keep versions and backups for up to 1 year. This will ensure that multiple versions of your OneDrive data are available to be restored at any time, should you require it.
The setup of the OneDrive Data Backup service is quick and easy and can be installed remotely by the Brash Support team.
If you would like to find out more about our OneDrive Data backup service, please don’t hesitate to contact us on support@brashsolutions.co.uk or 01442 877 555.