Trusted by more than 2.2 million users.
Organizations like yours don’t have time for lengthy, complex, and manual Microsoft Office 365 backup and recovery processes. That’s why we’ve made it fast, affordable, and reliable for you to automate your backup and end-user recovery.
Just because Microsoft has copies of your data doesn’t mean that it is accessible when and how you need it. Whether it’s time spent by admins managing backups and recoveries, or downtime experienced by your organization in the event of a data loss incident, the common problem to solve is eliminating time loss.
250 Hours
The average amount of time spent by IT workers annually retrieving lost data
Spanning provides daily, automated Microsoft Office 365 backup that auto-discovers new and/or altered content to back up. This takes place as part of a recurring, incremental backup process that runs quietly in the background each and every day without any additional effort from your admins or users. Simply “set and forget” your Spanning Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and know that all your valuable Microsoft Office 365 data will be safe and secure.
Spanning Backup for Microsoft Office 365 enables organizations with reliable backup and recovery for Microsoft Office 365 Mail, Teams, Calendar, OneDrive and SharePoint. Choose unlimited or 1-year retention licenses and meet compliance requirements by customizing cloud retention terms by data type (e.g., 90 days for email and 1 year for documents).
Flexible cloud retention of all your Microsoft Office 365 data. Remarkably fast, easy to install, manage and use – providing your organization with the lowest total cost of ownership in its class. Options to customize cloud retention terms based on data type and/or license type. Note that 1-year retention licenses are not available for MSPs.
Automated daily Microsoft Office 365 backup of ALL your data eliminates your time spent tediously managing backups (and eliminates your chance of errors, too).
Automated Daily Backup
On-Demand Backup
Unlimited Storage
Unlimited Versions
Exchange Online Backup
SharePoint Online Backup
OneDrive Backup
Microsoft Teams Backup
Admin users are allowed to perform Microsoft Office 365 backups and restore data for not only themselves, but any licensed user within your tenant. In addition, admins have the ability to restore data back into the original user account from which the backup was taken, or into a different user’s account altogether.
Search-Based Restore
Cross-User Restore
End-User Self-Service Restore
Point-In-Time Restore
Granular Folder & File Restore
Granular Email Restore
Granular Calendar Restore
You have your organization’s back(ups). Isn’t it time someone has YOUR back?
Backup Problems Report
Immutable Audit Log
Administrator API
Automatic Active Directory Sync
Regional Data Center Options
Individual License Management
You take data protection seriously. So do we.
SOC 2 Compliant
HIPAA Compliant Datacenters
GDPR Compliant
Built on Amazon Web Service
99.9% Uptime
Global Datacenters
Strong Encryption
Compartmentalized Access
Intrusion Detection
UE-EU Privacy Shield Certified
Virtual Private Cloud
Application-Level Security
See for yourself how IT leaders have gained back hours in their day with easy installation, automated backups, and end-user enablement.
“Having backup in place is the best IT practice; any critical data that we have, we should be backing up because we’re ultimately responsible for it as an organization.”
PAUL INBORIBOON
Director of Tech Infrastructure
“One and half years down the track we are very happy Spanning customers. We have saved countless hours of manual work.”
PAUL RETTER
IT Administrator
“We looked at a number of solutions, but Spanning was easy to setup, has the features we needed and just works. It is quick and easy to use.”
MARK WISELEY
CIO
“The product does what is supposed to at a great price. We are very happy with the solution.”
MATT HORN
IT Manager
The following are frequently asked questions about Microsoft Office 365 backup, native Microsoft Office 365 data recovery options and Microsoft Office 365 data retention periods:
Microsoft Office 365 backs up data on a regular basis as part of a commitment to data protection activities that generally support disaster recovery situations and keep your data accessible in accordance to their uptime SLA (99.9%). However, your organization remains ultimately responsible for your data protection as these backups are not available to administrators or end users and are not intended for aiding in the quick and easy restoration of lost data. While it is possible to recover lost data via Microsoft Office 365’s backups, the process will often prove tedious, costly, and detrimental to business continuity.
Microsoft Office 365 retention policies and capabilities are varied across its numerous services and tend to change with some frequency. While each service comes with a default, retention policies can be customized by administrators and are often used by organizations to manage and govern their data by establishing a preferred schedule of retaining and deleting content. This practice, however, does little to absolve organizations from their data protection obligations.
Retention policies can be applied in a variety of manners depending on the retention and deletion needs of an organization. They can be set to apply across an entire tenant or configured to affect only certain users and/or locations. Similarly, policies can be applied across all content types or restricted to content meeting specified conditions. For more detailed information on Microsoft Office 365 retention policies and how to manage them, please see Microsoft’s overview of retention policies.
The default retention setting for all messages and folders within Microsoft Office 365 is “Never Delete”. As such, Microsoft Office 365 emails and the contents of which should remain accessible unless acted upon by the user or systematically deleted via custom retention policy. In other words, Microsoft Office 365 has no stated policy of deleting emails automatically once they reach a certain age.
In the event that an email is deleted, it is first moved to the Deleted Items folder, which also has an unlimited retention setting. Items can be manually restored by the end user from the Deleted Items folder. If an item is deleted from this folder it moves to the Recoverable Items folder, which has a retention period of 14 days (admins can extend this period to a maximum of 30 days). Users and admins can recover items from this folder one at a time via a process known as Single Item Recovery. Once an item exceeds the retention period or is further deleted, it is moved to the Purge Folder.
Emails that have reached the Purge Folder will be retained for a maximum of 14 days. From here, only admins are able to use the Single Item Recovery feature to recover items for their end users. Once the 14-day retention period expires, items are permanently deleted from the tenant and become unrecoverable if a backup solution is not in place.
Microsoft Office 365 accounts are generally rendered inactive in the wake of an employee’s departure or extended absence from an organization. An admin will often choose to remove this account in which case the user’s data and account become restorable for a 30-day period before it is permanently deleted. In order to avoid critical data loss, the admin should consider what they want to do with the license moving forward and how they would like to deal with the departed user’s OneDrive and email content before deleting the user (removing the account) from the organization. To learn more, read Microsoft’s advice on deleting a user from your organization.
If a Microsoft Office 365 user account is deleted from a tenant there is a 30-day window to restore the account and all associated data. This 30-day period in known as the “soft deleted” state and there is a documented process (dependent on the manner of deletion) by which an admin may fully recover the user account. Once this 30-day retention period expires, the account is permanently deleted (hard deleted) and cannot be recovered if a backup and recovery solution is not in place.
Microsoft has taken extensive measures to alleviate the risks of data loss within Microsoft Office 365 and has put safeguards in place to ensure your data’s safety from any fault on their behalf. However, they cannot protect you from the actions of your users and threats beyond their control that constitute the majority of data loss events.
Even with an SLA that promises to keep your data accessible 99.9% of the time, they make no guarantee that their services are immune from disruption and “recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.” The bottom line is that the safety of your Microsoft Office 365 data is your responsibility and Microsoft alone cannot defend you from data loss.