The file that was never backed up
It happened — 2026AvePoint — M365 shared responsibility (2026)
Microsoft's own shared-responsibility model — documented, not folklore — says the customer, not Microsoft, is responsible for backing up their data; built-in retention keeps deleted items for roughly 30–93 days, and that window is not a backup. This year's industry research is blunt: 70% of businesses using cloud apps have lost data from them.
Your version happened in March, quietly. An account was closed to save a licence fee, and the leaver's OneDrive went with it. In June somebody asks where the project files are — and the recycle bin has been empty for months, retention was never configured, and the folder lived in exactly one place. Nobody did anything malicious, which is precisely what makes this the most ordinary data loss there is.
This is you if Licences get trimmed the day someone leaves; there's no backup line item anywhere in your spend; “We just keep everything in SharePoint” is the whole strategy.
How we run it
First we establish the clock.
What was deleted, when, from where — because every recovery route in Microsoft 365 or Google is a window measured in days, and “can you get it back?” is a date calculation, not a feeling.
Then every tier gets worked, in order.
Both recycle bins, retention holds, version history, the sync-conflict copies nobody knows exist, colleagues' local folders. It's a fast, methodical sweep — done once, properly, not four times in panic.
At the boundary, you get the truth the same day.
If it's past every window, we say “this is gone” now — not after a week of billable hope. If an old laptop's drive is the last chance, the Fixfactor lab is the honest next step, priced before we start.
Then real backup goes in, so the next one is a ticket.
A separate copy of the cloud estate, versions kept for years, restores tested quarterly — if we haven't restored it, it isn't backed up. And the leaver process gets reordered: the licence is removed after the files are handed over, never before.
Made boring by: SaaS backup with quarterly restore tests as onboarding-checklist work — converting this whole category from a crisis into a ticket. Recovery at £85/h · backup from Core £39/user/month
Microsoft's model is documented; loss statistics are industry research, quoted as such. The ten-person practice is illustrative.