Your Office 365 Mailbox is probably one of your most valuable sources of data. It doesn’t just hold all of your important email, it has your contacts, calendar, and more. This data can all be permanently lost in several ways.
A Treasuretrove of Information
It's actually kind of impressive to see just to see the insane amount of raw work and communication that is in some user mailboxes. Years worth of important emails, sensitive and critical information, record keeping, hundreds of contacts, calendars tracking years of coordination. Now imagine all the mailboxes in your company! When you think about it, your mailbox, and everyone else's in your organization is arguably one of the most important databases you will ever need yet most are not backed up.
So what can go wrong? Sometimes a user will accidentally delete all the mail in a folder or an entire folder tree by accident. It's fairly common for us to get a call that all the email in a person's Outlook is suddenly missing. Or that dozens of folders disappeared. If there is any doubt that mailbox data is critical, it's the panic in a user's voice when they call and folders are missing.
A Legal Lifesaver
Another common scenario we see is when an employee quits. Knowing that they are leaving, they may decide to delete all of their inbox, sent items, deleted items and other important emails. Those emails may be needed for the next employee in that role or they may even be needed for legal reasons. If they are thorough, and they usually are, those thousands of critical emails are gone forever.
This can be painful for two reasons. One, they may be deleting all traces of malicious activity they were doing. They could have been stealing information or clients, stealing from the organization, sending inappropriate emails or causing disruption thru slander or bad intentions.
Secondly, and surprisingly common, a lawsuit is involved and those emails that are not gone could have saved the firm and proved the organization's position. It's not only valuable when a former employee sues a firm or when the firm sues a former employee. It is priceless for any other type of lawsuit. There may be emails that have been deleted months earlier that could win the entire suit for a firm but are now gone. With mailbox backups and point in time snapshots, you can recover mailboxes from those points in time and get what you need.
Snapshots in Time
The simple solution for this is to set up mailbox backups that take snapshots of the mailboxes at regular intervals so some, or all, of the data, can be recovered as needed. These are done by taking snapshots of everything in the mailbox on a schedule so a mailboxes can be recovered at various points in history. This can be a real life saver!
Fortunately, this is fairly easy and inexpensive to set up. You can even select key people, "concerning" people, managers or it can be done for the entire company. If you would like to have mailbox backups for you or your organization, we would love to get you set up, just let us know.
