Litigation Hold, the hold feature introduced in Exchange 2010 to preserve data for eDiscovery, is still available in Exchange Server and Exchange Online. Litigation Hold keeps a copy of user data but does not restore lost data. However, in no way does is it equal in functionality of O365 backup.
With Litigation Hold, you risk the chance of liability because it only allows you to place all items on hold. All data would be discoverable in legal proceedings not just data needed for the legal process.
Additionally, Litigation Hold offers no direct restore option. It is not designed to restore user account data. Users would have to go through a manual recovery process after exporting their data. And, restoring mail from Litigation Hold does not preserve the folder structure. How will this impact your users?
With the rampant spread of malware and ransomware and Litigation Hold’s inefficient method to restore, you may want to think twice about using it instead of the more holistic, efficient process O365 backup with Veeam provides.
Financially, since user data cannot be deleted with Litigation Hold, storage costs will skyrocket. And without the ability to archive users, if you need to maintain their data, you must continue to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.
Regarding former employees, it’s not easy to restore their emails, documents and/or data to a different user. With Litigation Hold, recovering back into O365 requires exporting specific data and then importing it back in, a cumbersome and time-consuming task.
Need another reason why Litigation Hold cannot compete with O365 Backup? No copy of data in a secondary physical location is created with Litigation Hold. To enable rapid restores of user data, you must look to third-party, purpose-built Office 365 backup solutions, like our O365 BaaS with Veeam product.
Green Cloud’s O365 BaaS with Veeam backs up Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint. O365 BaaS will preserve and restore your data whether it has been accidentally deleted, is prone to internal/external security threats or must be maintained due to legal and compliance requirements. Our backups allow impacted customers to quickly restore user data to before disaster struck.
Our O365 BaaS solution also allows customers to backup and maintain a users’ former employees’ data. This feature delivers huge cost savings; you would not have to make recurring payments for Microsoft licenses to maintain those past employees’ data. Our O365 BaaS solution allows customers to restore archived user data quickly to current users.
Litigation Hold can be costly, risky and hard to manage. And it is not backup.
