Applies to: OneDrive for Business
The OneDrive for Business sync client enables constant synchronization of the user's local files with their copies in the Office 365 cloud. Thanks to this, the user, apart from accessing their files from anywhere in the world, at any time, gains additional security of their data by keeping their copies in the cloud. However, deleting a file or encrypting it on the computer's local drive will also be mapped by the synchronization mechanism in the Office 365 cloud. Therefore, it would not be a significant data protection ...
Enriching OneDrive with the ability to restore the state of files from any point in the last 30 days allows this service to be treated as a local files backup mechanism.
For example, in the case of encrypting the user's documents, even if the synchronization process moves the encrypted files to the cloud, the user can easily roll back these changes by recovering the versions of the files before the encryption. If the user deletes documents from the local drive by mistake and the synchronization mechanism deletes them from the Office 365 cloud, the same way the user can roll back the deletions.
It should be noted that the functionality discussed here is used primarily in situations where there has been a "mass" change in the OneDrive content. If the user wants to recover the previous version of a single file, he can use the document version recovery function, and if the file is deleted - restore it from the Recycle Bin. These mechanisms are discussed in the articles Restore a previous version of a file in OneDrive and Delete or restore files and folders in OneDrive
Once again, it should be noted that you can restore OneDrive from the last 30 days.
Restoring OneDrive from a specific time
- Sign in to Office 365 and go to OneDrive
- At the top of the page, select Settings
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Select OneDrive Restore from the menu that appears along the right edge of the screen. - On the restore page, select a date from the drop-down list. You can also choose custom dates and times.
If you choose from the predefined dates (Yesterday, One week ago, Three weeks ago), go to step 7.
- If you select Custom date and time, you'll see a histogram showing your daily OneDrive activity.
Histogram shows the number of changes made to OneDrive in each of the last 30 days. Below the histogram, a list of operations performed on each day is presented, which may make it easier to identify unusual activities caused by, for example, malware.
The histogram is displayed in reverse chronological order - day 0 represents today.
The list of operations can be scrolled down or by setting the slider on the desired day, it can be set on a given day.
- Find (by scrolling the changelist or moving the slider) the first operation to be undone.
Once selected, all subsequent operations will also be marked for undo. If the user added new files during the retirement period, those files will disappear from OneDrive. For this, among other things, you should review all operations marked for withdrawal.
It is not possible to selectively identify changes that are subject to withdrawal. - Once the rollback list has been established, select the Restore button to undo all selected actions.
Restrictions on Playback
- The OneDrive Restore functionality uses the Version History and the OneDrive Recycle Bin to restore the state, so the same restrictions apply. If Version History is disabled, you will not be able to complete this recovery procedure. To verify your Version History settings, see Enable and configure versioning for a list or library.
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Files cannot be restored if they have been deleted from the Second Level Recycle Bin.
If you delete a file or folder and it's uploaded back to OneDrive, the OneDrive restore procedure will skip restoring that file / folder.
If some files or folders cannot be restored, an error log file will be created in the OneDrive to root folder. The filename will start with "RestoreLog"; it will be followed by an identifier
(e.g. RestoreLog-e8b977ee-e059-454d-8117-569b380eed67.log).