Microsoft Data Understanding Backup vs. Sync: Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, Planner, SharePoint

Hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Hey, I made this video per a request from a member of a client organization, and it really opened my eyes. I realized I was making some mistakes when I was taking a look at how Microsoft handles your data, not only for your email and calendar, but in all of the 365 apps. I sort of went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this one, um, but I'm glad I did because I realized I might have been making a few mistakes and taking on some risks that maybe I shouldn't. Uh, so let's dive right into this one. Um, uh, basically I was a bit surprised by what I discovered. By the way, before we get too deep into today's video, I'd like to thank today's video sponsor, uh, Stellar Data Recovery. Which is a perfect sponsor for this video about data backups, storage, and possible data loss. You'll learn a bit more about what they can do for Microsoft users a bit later in the video. So enjoy. For the most part, they're not really doing a backup. And when I say that, what I mean is this: it's more of a sync. And what that means is they've got your data file out on the Microsoft cloud And whenever you log in and you start working on that file, it is synchronizing the changes you are making, which is good. That's better than nothing, because what that means is basically you've got your data in active form out there. But a backup is a slightly different beast. What a backup is, is a date-stamped, time-stamped full copy of your information. And the difference between a sync and a backup— a sync can actually overwrite something you didn't want overwritten or delete something that you accidentally didn't save properly. Um, and it's just going to make it real time, the same as what you had when you were working on it. And I actually, when I did this research, realized I think I lost some information from one of my OneNote notebooks a couple months ago, and I think this might be why it happened. So we're going to get in and talk about what this means for you and your data, and also how you can make sure you're not making some of the mistakes I might have been making. Now, what's interesting about this, this is outside of my core stroke. I am more on the user side of things, how to use these tools to be more productive, more effective, more efficient. So I'm going to say this right off the bat. If you are like an IT data security expert and I'm saying something that isn't exactly right, please put it in the comments and let people know. I'd love to start this as a bit of a forum so that people can really learn what's sort of going on here. I think I've got it pretty well, but I just want to make sure that if I'm saying something that's glaringly wrong, that the community sort of helps fix that. That as we go through this. All right. So now with saying that, first thing I wanted to find out is where does it sync? And I actually went out to datacentermap.com and I found this map of the data centers that are around the globe. And so let's talk a little bit about what it means when they sync. When they sync, you're working on your 365 tools. It is syncing according to time slots. We're going to talk about that in a minute, how often it's doing the sync depending on the program. And what it does is it syncs to probably your nearest data center. But then what it has is geographical redundancy. What that means is it syncs there, but then it also syncs to another location on this Microsoft map of tools. And as you can see, their data centers, um, you know, all over the world, but the biggest set of them are in North America and Europe, which probably matches where they have their largest user bases. Um, but, uh, what's interesting is You've got a synchronization of your information that is also then basically being backed up sort of to a second location. So that way, if there's a big problem at a single data center, the second data center will kick in and you'll still be able to access and manage your information. Good. Again, these are all good things, um, but One of the things that I found out by diving into this is that there's change, there's differences in how often they do the sync as standard course. Like your Outlook email and calendar is like every 10 minutes, which is good. You want that to be happening that quickly. Now, one interesting thing we're going to talk about, a little issue I found with Outlook in just a minute because it made me realize, uh-oh, I could have a problem potentially here. With your OneDrive, which means most of your documents and files— Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, pictures, this, that, and the other thing— as well as your SharePoint saved files, that's about every 12 hours. And so one of the things that I might even recommend is if you've worked extensively on a pretty important document or file, you might want to go into your file cabinet and just make sure that that one file has either been backed up remotely or that you've made sure it has manually synced to the cloud. You know, especially if it's a really important document or file. Now, I also found out that your Teams channels and tabs, which are hosted on your SharePoint, they're basically getting done every 12 hours too. Interesting little thing that I found out though, the Teams chat, while the Teams channel and tabs is on SharePoint, your Teams chat is typically saved in the OneDrive of whoever it was that called and hosted the meeting. So slightly different locations for the channels and tabs versus the chats. OneNote, this is why I think I got caught. It's basically in real time. But here's the thing, it's not really backed up. And what had happened with me is that I had done some work— just hear how this plays out— I had done some work on my computer in my OneNote notebook. I then opened up OneNote on my tablet in a different place, and I made some changes and did a couple things. And because I did the stuff on my tablet after I did the stuff on my computer, I had left open some that was in my computer and I must have somehow accidentally overwrote it. It was gone. It was just gone. And I couldn't figure out a way to get it back. And I looked, I said, there's got to be a backup. There wasn't a backup because I hadn't done the backup. And I also found that basically the same thing. There's no backups for what you're doing in Planner if you're using Planner in conjunction with To Do in Teams. Now, what's interesting about that they actually do have a recommended strategy on how you can back up your plans to Microsoft Excel. And what I'd like to do right now is I'd like to open up my OneNote real quick and show you something that you need to know. So here we are in my OneNote, and what I found out that you probably should be doing much more regularly is go over to any of your active notebooks, especially if you've been doing significant work on them, right-click and then hit Sync This Notebook Now. Because if you do Sync This Notebook Now, um, then what you can do is go up to the File tab and hit Open Backups. And when you go to Open Backups, this is what was sort of interesting. Take a look at this. So I just recently did a Sync This Backup— or Sync This Notebook Now for Randy Dean's notebook. If I open this up, take a look. I've got backups dated of today at this time, which is sort of fascinating because notice I hadn't made backups in a long time. I was making a mistake. I could have lost work because I didn't have backups. Of course, it is syncing to the Microsoft cloud, but without those backups, if I accidentally overwrite something, it's probably gone. That's what I think happened to me. So, you know, keep that in mind. This may actually be a little bit a little bit of a data risk that you might have too. And when you've been doing extensive work on your OneNote, you might want to make sure you're doing that sync operation so you've got formal backups. All right. So let's get back to talking about this. Now let's go back and talk about what they recommend you do with Planner. All right. So I just opened up my Planner page here. And what I found out that you're supposed to do is if you've created plans, What they strongly recommend that you do if you've been in working on your plans and you've made changes is inside the plan. So you'll see I'm in my tasks plan where I have several different buckets that I've created. You come up to the tasks plan, you see the drop caret right here, click on this and then export plan to Excel. Excel is your backup. You want to create date-stamped, time-stamped Excel files that are basically manual backups of your Planner plans. That's how you make your backup. And if you don't do this, that means that if you accidentally overwrite something or delete something because it's a project you think you're done with, but then all of a sudden, you know, a year later you're doing almost the exact same project, you could lose all of that intellectual knowledge and institutional knowledge. So I strongly recommend whenever you're using your planner tools and you've done extensive work in terms of planning, create some backups in Excel with date-based and time-based stamps on them and do it regularly. All right, because there's really no backup to this. And that sort of boggles my mind. If you're from Microsoft and you're watching this, Can you please maybe create a utility to allow us to create a Planner backup so we're not doing this manually ourselves? Just seems like there's a lot of risk here with both the OneNote and the Planner of people not realizing that they're sort of on the hook to create their own backups. Um, so, um, definitely that was an eye-opener for me. Um, and so it changed how I'm doing things. Now let's get back into you know, sort of what we're talking about here. I actually thought my active Outlook OST file was automatically backing up to my OneDrive. It's syncing to my OneDrive. That's a little bit different because here's the thing that could be an issue. Let's say you're working on your computer and somehow it gets— that file gets corrupted. If it's doing a sync, the corruption— corrupted file might get synced, which sort of overwrites the file you were using. The better practice is to make sure you've got, once again, date-stamped, time-stamped backups. Um, one of the things that it made me realize is I also hadn't set up my auto archiving as well as I should for all of my subfolders in my accounts. And so with all of this, I sort of dropped everything and I basically went in and created date-stamped, time-stamped backups of my OST file, my archive PST files. I also went in and made backups of my OneNote notebooks, and I made backups of my Planner plans to date-stamped, time-stamped Excel files. Hey, are you an IT manager or decision maker? Today's video is sponsored by Stellar Data Recovery and their product Stellar Converter. Stellar Converter for OST is the trusted solution for IT MVPs. It seamlessly converts all OST mailbox components to PST with 100% precision. This includes emails, attachments, contacts, calendar items, and notes. There are no file size limitations, ensuring a smooth conversion process. The software can handle inaccessible, orphaned, encrypted, or IMAP OST files, and it's compatible with Outlook 2021, 2019, 2016, and earlier versions. Additionally, it offers the convenience of migrating offline OST files to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Making it an indispensable tool for IT admins and professionals alike. You can learn more here or following the link in the description. Now, what's interesting is, you know, one of the things I want to talk about though is that if you're using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and you're saving those with autosave on your OneDrive, you're probably okay for at least a little bit because it's almost doing what is technically a backup. And let me show you what I mean. Uh, let's jump out right into this PowerPoint right here, and I want to show you something. I've covered this in previous videos. You'll see that I've got this PowerPoint open to do this presentation, but if I open it up, notice what you've got right here. It's called version history. Now it only goes back a number of days, I think maybe 30 days, but with version history, what you can do is you can click on that and see when you've done work on this. And so what that does is that means that let's say you accidentally overwrite something that you really wished you didn't. You can go back and reopen one of the previous versions which has the work the way it should be, and then basically do a Save As from that to go back to the original file while still being able to keep working on the new file. You know, I always tell people knowing that you've got version history out there, you should almost always have your autosave for your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on. But try to be really good at doing Save As whenever you're going to use the same document you've made in the past as effectively a template for something new you're going to do. But like I said, you know, if you made a mistake and you messed that up, you've got version history here to go back to. I always tell people, what's the bigger risk, that you're going to overwrite a file and not be able to get it back in version history, or that you're going to spill coffee on your keyboard? And I think the coffee on the keyboard is the far bigger risk. So, you know, with your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, you sort of do have backups in there. A little bit more risk with some of these other things though. All right. I made several changes because of what I found out here. First, I made manual backups. I'm going to make myself a little bit smaller, get myself out of the way there. That's good. I made manual backups to my remote drive of all of my Outlook files, active and archive. And I've now added a task to my task list for far more regular backups. I'm going to be doing full regular backups of my Outlook OST and PST files. Basically, the OST is your active file that is being saved to your OneDrive and sort of synchronizing with your work as you're doing your work. But like I said, it's not quite the same as a full backup, which is a snapshot of your data at a specific date and time of everything there. And also for the PST files, which are your archive files, you know, say for your older emails, if you've got that set up, which I strongly recommend. Um, I also set up my, um, auto archiving, uh, a little bit better. I got a new laptop a few months ago. Um, I didn't real— I thought that all of my settings from when I brought my Outlook in would just carry over. They didn't. You need to set up your auto archiving whenever you switch to a new PC. Now, of course, if you're working in a company, hopefully your IT's doing all this for you already. But if you're like a solopreneur like me, you got to get in under the hood and make sure these things are set up right. Once again, I said I created those new Excel backups for my plans in Planner, which were saved in both my OneDrive, but also I'm creating a backup copy. Now remember, with those Excel backups, I do have my version histories, and I created new notebook backups in my OneNote. Now this is where I'd like to throw this out to the IT experts that may be watching this video. Is this robust enough? Am I doing what I need to do here? I'm using like a backup drive, remote backup drive that I have, and I'm trying to make these copies that would be available for me in my cloud drive for Microsoft. One of the other things that I read, and it was coming up consistently again and again, you know, what it was basically saying is, you know, if you're working for a larger company, you're probably okay because your IT department IT department has probably set up the backups you need for all of these things. They have learned how to make sure that these issues are sort of under control. They're doing the appropriate third-party backups or secondary location backups with date stamps and timestamps so that if you lose something, pretty darn good chance you're going to get it back. But if you're in a very small company or solopreneur, you don't have dedicated IT support, you might be making some assumptions here that are pretty dangerous, uh, and you could potentially lose your data and information. Um, and so if so, um, almost all of them were saying you might want to look into a more formal, uh, third-party backup system that's automatic. It just basically— you sign up for this extra service and it comes in and it makes the backups you need of the programs that you're using very frequently on a regular cycle as you need them so that you don't have to worry or think about it. Think of it like an insurance policy. You're basically paying for an insurance policy to make sure you keep your data. The other thing that's important is to know that there are data recovery firms out there. Like, uh, one of them is, uh, Stellar, and they actually will help you sort of regain the data from corrupted or lost files, especially like Outlook files, OST and such. So I hope that this was a bit of an eye-opener for you. I hope that you found some use of this. I hope I didn't scare too many of you, especially that are working for your own small companies. And like I said, once again, if you're like an IT data security and backup expert, please add comments here into the comments because Like I said, this is not my core stroke. This is a little bit outside of where my focus typically is. I found it extraordinarily useful doing this research, but I'm not 100% sure that everything I share here is absolutely textbook perfect. So if you have some comments and additional learning that you can share, things maybe I forgot to mention that you know about that have popped up with your work, please leave those comments in the comment stream, and hopefully we can do more with this. Depending on what I see, maybe I'll make more videos on this topic. All right. So with that, let's finish this one up. Once again, I'm Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert. I'd like to thank you for your time for watching this video by offering you the opportunity to get my Productivity PDF Tip Sheets. These have like video tip links, as well as some, you know, sort of written tip sheets on how to better manage your time, your email, and your related technology. So if you'd like to get those, send me an email at randy@randaldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And if you'd like to learn more about me, go visit my website, randaldean.com. I have a special deal right now where if you sign up for my e-newsletter, monthly e-newsletter Timely Tips, you'll get a free copy of my ebook on Taming the Email Beast, which also, because it's an ebook, gives you links to the video tips in the ebook. Alright, thanks for your time. Hope you had fun. Bye now.