Best Practices for Safe SharePoint Backups. SharePoint is a central tool for many businesses as it allows users to collaborate, store documents, and manage shared information. But native recovery tools alone may not be enough for operational continuity or compliance. In this video, we’ll cover best practices for creating safe SharePoint backups across SharePoint Online and on-premises environments. Before we begin, be sure to subscribe to NinjaOne’s IT video hub and our YouTube channel for more tech content like this. Understanding SharePoint’s Native Recovery Limits. Before we discuss how to create safe SharePoint backups, let’s discuss the native limitations of SharePoint. It includes tools like the Recycle Bin, version history, and retention policies. These features are helpful for short-term recovery, but they don’t replace a full backup strategy. These tools may help support compliance objectives, but on their own they typically do not provide the long-term retention, recovery, auditing, and administrative controls many organizations require to satisfy regulations such as CCPA, HIPAA, FINRA, and GDPR. Creating a SharePoint Backup Strategy Using Best Practices. Now, let’s go through the process of creating safe SharePoint backups, step-by-step. Step 1: Define What to Back Up. Knowing what data to back up is the foundation of your SharePoint backup strategy. Ideally, you should capture entire site hierarchies and individual objects. Don't forget version history and audit logs if required for compliance. Depending on your environment, audit logs may be stored in Microsoft Purview and should be protected as part of your broader compliance strategy. Step 2: Choose a Backup Solution. Next, we need to choose a solution. Consider solutions that support both granular and full-site SharePoint recovery, including restoration of permissions, metadata, and site structure. Granular recovery lets you restore a single deleted file or corrupted list without overwriting recent changes. Full-site recovery is essential for ransomware attacks or major deletions. While granular recovery is more often used, having a full-site recovery option is valuable in case of a ransomware attack or accidental deletion. Step 3: Testing, Monitoring, and Security. Your backup system needs ongoing monitoring to catch failed jobs and unusual behavior before they become problems. Automated reports help with SLA compliance and internal visibility. Regular restoration tests in a test environment verify that your backups actually work when you need them. Security is also critical. Backups should be encrypted both at rest and in transit, stored redundantly across multiple locations, and protected with role-based access control. Immutable backups add another layer of protection when compliance requires it. Hybrid and Integration Considerations. If you're running a hybrid environment, SharePoint Online and on-premises servers need to stay synchronized. It's also worth noting that Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and some Microsoft 365 applications store or manage content through SharePoint services, so your backup solution should cover these integrated workloads to avoid gaps in protection. Native SharePoint tools are helpful, but they aren’t enough. Third-party backup tools are necessary for safe SharePoint backups. For more information, check out our official blog post on Best Practices for Safe SharePoint Backups linked in the description below.