What is cloud backup?

Cloud backup is a service that sends a copy of your data over the internet and keeps it on a provider’s storage servers, so you can get it back if the original is lost. It gives a business a copy outside the building without anyone having to carry a drive home.

How it works

You choose what to protect and how often, and the service sends copies to the provider’s servers on that schedule. Set it to run automatically, so that nobody has to remember. To restore, you sign in and bring the data back down.

Everything travels over your internet connection, so a very large restore is slower than copying from a drive in the next room. The Australian Signals Directorate suggests using both: a cloud backup for the files that matter most, and an external drive for a copy of the whole system.

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are not a backup

A backup is a copy of your data kept separately from the system you work in. If your documents live in SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive, and your email lives in Exchange Online or Gmail, those services are the system you work in. Storing something there does not make a second copy that you control.

Microsoft’s own shared responsibility model says this directly. Microsoft looks after the datacentres, the hardware and the service itself. The customer stays responsible for their data and their accounts in every kind of cloud service, and Microsoft 365 is one of the examples it names.

What the providers do is keep the service available. Microsoft says Exchange Online keeps copies of each mailbox in separate datacentres so that a failure at one does not take your email offline. In the same article it says Exchange Online does not offer a traditional backup: there is no way to return a mailbox to how it looked at an earlier point in time.

What you do get is a recycle bin with a time limit:

• In SharePoint and OneDrive, a deleted file is permanently removed 93 days after it was deleted.
• In Google Drive, an administrator can recover a file for 25 days after the user empties their trash. After that Google purges it and it cannot be recovered.
• Google says its Vault product is not designed to be a backup tool, and that you might want a backup to protect against human error or ransomware.

So a folder deleted by mistake, or by a staff member on their way out, and noticed four months later is gone. Microsoft notes that other vendors sell products that can restore a mailbox to an earlier point, and Google lists its own export tools and partner products.

What to ask about a cloud backup service

• What does it cover? The Australian Signals Directorate’s advice is to list every place important information is kept, including email and cloud accounts, and check each one is in the backup plan.
• How far back can it go? Ask how long copies are kept. It needs to be longer than the time a problem could go unnoticed.
• Is there a copy that is offline? The same guidance recommends keeping one backup disconnected, and one in a different place from the device it protects.
• Who can restore, and how long does it take? The only way to know is to try it.

Where to go next

Cloud backup is usually the off-site copy in the 3-2-1 backup rule. If you are weighing it against a storage box in the office, read NAS or cloud backup: which makes more sense for your business?. Testing a restore is covered in A backup you have never restored is a guess.