First off a couple of facts about “lost data”. Unless you’ve written over the top of the very spot on the hard drive, that data isn’t lost. It is, however an absolute pain in the rear to gain access to data that has lost it’s structure. I still remember the day that on an IBM 8088 computer that I was intending to delete some files from a directory and instead I was at the root of the C drive and typed in del *.*. Yeah, back in the dos days that was ugly.
And just because your data is in “da cloud” you need backups as well. Office 365 is not immune to accidental deletions of information, and while in any cloud platform …just like it is on your local PC, the data is honestly still there, you just don’t have the ability to be an admin on a cloud server to run the necessary undelete tools to put it back.
And then… protect those backups. As an unencrypted iPhone backup on a computer can often be accessed to get into phone data. Back in the ancient days of offsite backup tapes, many a story was in the news that a backup tape was lost in transit.
While both cloud backups and onsite backups are invaluable tools, what you need to ask yourself is how fast do you want your data back? A cloud restore process works, but may take time. An onsite backup is often prone to failure, but is the fastest way to recover a lot of data.
So what backup solution do you use? And for the bonus in paranoia… do you randomly delete a file/rename it and attempt a recovery? When’s the last time you tested your backup?