Backup & Continuity
Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
A cloud application being up is not the same as your data in it being safe. The vendor keeps the service running. What happens to the records inside it is your problem, and their agreement usually says so in plain terms.
This is the assumption we correct most often. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and the rest are all built to survive their own outages. None of them is built to undo what somebody in your business did on a Tuesday.
The cases that actually hurt are ordinary rather than dramatic: a mailbox cleared out, a shared drive overwritten, a bad import that rewrites thousands of records at once, a departing employee who empties their own account, or a compromised login deleting as it goes. Every one of those is a valid instruction as far as the vendor is concerned, so it is faithfully replicated everywhere the vendor keeps your data.
Cloud-to-cloud backup keeps an independent copy somewhere the application cannot reach, and it is inexpensive. The expensive part is finding out at the wrong moment that nobody had one.
What this covers
- Microsoft 365: mail, calendars, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
- Google Workspace: Gmail, Drive, shared drives, and Calendar.
- Salesforce and other line-of-business platforms, records and attachments together.
- QuickBooks and finance systems, on a schedule your accountant can live with.
- Held independently of the vendor, so a problem in their tenant is not also a problem for your copy.
- Recovery of a single record or file, without restoring everything around it.
- Retention past the point an account is closed, so a leaver does not take their data with them.
Common questions
Does our provider not back this up already?
They protect the service and usually hold deleted items for a limited window, which covers a mistake somebody notices quickly. It does not cover a deletion nobody spots for a quarter. Read your agreement: most of them state plainly that the data is your responsibility.
Is this not what the recycle bin is for?
Only inside its window, and only for deletions. It will not help with a bad bulk import that overwrote good records with wrong ones, which in our experience is the more common way a cloud system loses data.
Which applications can you cover?
The mainstream ones are straightforward: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and the common finance platforms. For anything more specialized, the question is whether it has an interface we can pull from, and that is a short conversation with a definite answer.
How is this different from your Microsoft 365 Backup page?
Same job, different scope. That page is the detail for a Microsoft tenant specifically. This one covers the other systems your business runs on, which usually turn out to be more than one.
Part of Backup & Business Continuity
Backup that somebody has restored from on purpose, so the first real test is not the day you need it.