New OneDrive feature could help you swiftly recover from a ransomware attack

Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft has announced a new feature which allows OneDrive users to roll back their cloud storage account to any point in the last 30 days, but this capability is only available to business users at this point – although hopefully it might reach consumer OneDrive accounts in the future.

Files Restore is described as a complete self-service recovery solution, and is accessed via Settings. It presents a menu showing a graph of activity pertaining to your OneDrive account over the last 30 days, allowing you to see exactly what happened on each day, and pick out a recovery point (i.e. when someone messed up a crucial file, or before a ransomware infection struck).

You can restore just a couple of files, or a whole load, and the process is all carried out with just a few clicks.

OneDrive for Business

Easy recovery

Of course, there is a recycle bin in OneDrive allowing for file rescue anyway, but this goes further in offering a dead simple recovery process for potentially your entire cloud storage locker in the case of some major disaster like ransomware.

It was previously rumored that Microsoft would allow this feature to restore your OneDrive account to any point in the past, but that isn’t the case – there is a 30-day limit here as mentioned.

Files Restore is currently rolling out to OneDrive for Business users from today, so you might not have it live yet, but it shouldn’t take long for the facility to arrive. Microsoft says it will be deploying the feature in stages over the next few weeks.

Via The Verge

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).