Being responsible with your data 101

Now that operating in the cloud is the norm and on-premise deployments are the outliers in the software industry, it's time to review the nature of service agreements and SLAs for SaaS services - in this case, those provided by Microsoft like Dynamics 365.

If you take just a moment to read Section 6b in the Microsoft Services Agreement, you will see what is commonly referred to as the Shared Responsibility Model. It states:

"We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services." (Microsoft Services Agreement)

So while it is great to have 99.x% guaranteed uptime of the service, it is a little nerve wracking to think that the data doesn't have any explicit guarantees and that the onus is put on the customer.  To this extent, you are solely responsible for your data.

It is imperative to note that Dynamics does allow customers to backup and restore their databases at will.  However, this will require uptime of the SaaS service first, so in a true outage scenario, customers will have no access to their data be it live system data or backups.  

Make note too that in Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC), the backup function is only available for a full SQL database backup, and it is only able to be performed to a sandbox instance.  This means that in your storage licensing plan you should always account for (at a minimum) room for at least one full copy of production in your tenant in the case that you need to do a restore!  Yes, this means paying for storage that you hope to never use.  Oh yeah, and if you do a full database restore, you lose good data too since you don't get the option to designate a subset of data (for example, if you restore to recover lost Opportunities, then all updates, additions, changes, etc. for ALL other tables like Accounts, Contacts, etc. will also get overwritten back to the restore point!).

Finally, there is the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse which is an incredible tool that allows customers to copy D365 data into very affordable Azure storage options. (Create an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with Azure Data Lake - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs)  It is important to note that this does NOT remove the data from the Dataverse tenant storage, it merely copies it.  More importantly, there isn't a clean nor easy way to restore the data from Azure, so while you may have a backup snapshot of the data, it is only reportable against.

Going back to the Services Agreement, Microsoft recommends using a third-party tool/service, so the best place to begin this search is none other than the Dynamics AppSource catalog: Business Apps – Microsoft AppSource.  

Cheers!