Why Do You Need to Back up Documents in SharePoint

SharePoint is a Microsoft product that promotes collaboration among organizations by allowing them to store, organize, manage, and share documents and other content. You can create intranet as well as extranet websites on SharePoint for content sharing while having thorough control over data confidentiality and security. Just like other data storage platforms, it is also prone to data loss and corruption issues. This creates the need to backup SharePoint with all of its data, including site collection, sites, subsites, lists, libraries, folders, versions, metadata, etc.

Organizations usually overlook backing up cloud-based applications like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive. However, these are the tools where professionals spend time majorly, creating a high risk of losing business-critical data. In this article, we will learn some convincing reasons that explain the need to backup documents in SharePoint.

Reasons to backup SharePoint documents

Microsoft has induced no provision of backing up SharePoint automatically, which means if you are skipping the step of SharePoint backup, there’s a huge potential of losing data. This simply states that if you’re not saving the data, no one else is going to do so on your behalf. Microsoft SharePoint follows the shared responsibility model, explaining that Microsoft is only responsible for keeping the infrastructure and service running, and the user is the sole responsible individual for data security.

Let’s now delve into the factors that create the need to backup SharePoint documents.

1. Prevent data loss: There are several factors that can lead to data loss in SharePoint, such as corruption, power outages, abrupt system shutdowns, etc. Backing up SharePoint documents involves creating a copy of documents ensuring that your data is kept safe and secure.
2. Human error: Users may often accidentally delete a SharePoint document or make changes to the version during inefficient network connectivity, leading to permanent deletion of data in most cases.
3. Software failure: When the Microsoft 365 service is down, the server crashes or software corruption occurs, it might induce corruption in the SharePoint documents and other data. SharePoint document backup helps preserve the data even after corruption.
4. Security threats: Cyber-attacks such as ransomware and malware are quite common these days. Attackers first make the data inaccessible and then ask for a ransom to make it accessible again. A comprehensive SharePoint backup helps you escape from downtime and breakdowns in business operations.
5. Data retention: Microsoft automatically deletes data from accounts that have been inactive for more than 90 days. Therefore, users need to take the required actions to maintain data security and retention. Backup allows you to retain SharePoint data for as long as you want.

Having a SharePoint documents backup stored safely at your end helps restore efficiency and business continuity while minimizing the possibility of downtime. Regular backups allow easy recovery of large amounts of data even if they are permanently deleted from the SharePoint platform.

Read also: Cyfersoft Contribution to Cloud Technology

How to backup documents in SharePoint?

There are many ways to backup SharePoint documents that you can choose based on the amount of data to backup and how quickly you want to save the data backup, and only some of these are useful in case of recovering from fatal data loss.

Manual download of data

Taking a backup of SharePoint documents tends to help in preventing sudden loss of data. You can simply download the documents by manually selecting them one-by-one and then downloading them to your system’s local storage. However, the manual selection of documents turns this method fallible and time-consuming. In case of huge data, you might unintentionally skip important documents, which makes it unfit for backup.

Windows PowerShell

PowerShell scripts are quite helpful in migrating, recovering, and backing up SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft services. Any SharePoint site admin with the “db_owner” and “securityadmin” roles while being a member of Administrators group can export SharePoint backup using the following cmdlet:

Export-SPWeb <Site URL> -Itemurl  <Relative path of List or Library> -path <Backup-path>

However, this can help only if you’re an expert at running PowerShell cmdlet without making errors; it might consume hours of your efforts to run the process error-free and without causing data loss.

Use professional tools for backup

There are many professional SharePoint migration tools that can help you store SharePoint data. Many businesses turn to Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) and migrate SharePoint data to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Another reliable choice to secure your SharePoint data is with a third-party SharePoint migration tool that ensures the migration of all the content to another destination. This way, you can take the SharePoint documents to other platforms and use them to restore the SharePoint environment in case of catastrophes.

Some small steps that you can consider to prevent critical data loss include taking regular backups, creating multiple copies of backups, testing backups frequently, and drafting robust backup and restore policies for your organization.

Conclusion

SharePoint backup is a crucial practice every business should follow to preserve data from data loss or corruption. However, due to a lack of efficient native methods to backup documents in SharePoint, enterprises use a SharePoint migration tool like Kernel Migration for SharePoint. It helps to export SharePoint documents to Office 365 components like SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Microsoft.