biz59Backups for a ten-person business: what Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 don't keep, and what a restore costs
Google keeps a deleted file about 55 days and a removed user 20; Microsoft keeps files 93 days, email 14 and a removed user 30. The day-by-day windows, two cases where they were not enough, 2026 backup prices for ten people ($360 to $1,057 a year), what a slow restore costs and a drill to test yours.
Most small offices run on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and assume the provider keeps a copy of everything. It keeps a copy of everything that still exists. Both suites protect you very well against a disk failing in a data centre, and much less against the things that actually go wrong in a ten-person business: someone deletes a folder and nobody notices for two months, a departed employee's account is removed before anyone exported their mail, a retention setting is applied to the wrong people, or ransomware on one laptop syncs encrypted files into the shared drive.
This piece sets out, day by day, how long each suite lets you undo those mistakes in October 2026, what an outside backup costs for ten people, a worked bill, two real cases where the built-in safety nets were not enough, and a restore drill you can run in an afternoon, with the restore times the vendors publish.
The windows: how long a deleted thing can still be brought back
All figures are from Google's and Microsoft's admin documentation, checked on 30 October 2026. "Admin" means someone with the super admin (Google) or global/SharePoint admin (Microsoft) role, working in the admin console.
Two details matter more than the numbers. First, on Google the admin restore covers a date range and "it might take several days for the data to reappear", it stops if the user or organisation is at its storage limit, and starting a second restore stops the first one. Second, on Microsoft the 93-day clock starts when the item is deleted, not when someone empties the recycle bin, and Exchange's 14 days is short: a message deleted from Deleted Items on 1 March is out of reach for the user on 15 March unless an admin raised the limit to 30.
What the windows mean in practice
The pattern: both suites are fine if you notice within a few weeks. Anything found later, anything tied to a removed account, and anything removed by a policy rather than a person has no way back without a copy kept somewhere else.
Two cases where the built-in safety net was not enough
KPMG, August 2020: one retention policy, 145,000 chat histories
An administrator meant to remove a single account from a Microsoft Teams retention policy. The change applied the deletion policy to the whole firm instead, and the personal chat history of about 145,000 people was removed. The internal memo reported by The Register said Microsoft had confirmed the chats were not recoverable. Nothing was hacked and nothing failed; the suite did exactly what the policy said. A ten-person company is not KPMG, but the mechanism is the same at any size: a policy deletes without passing through any recycle bin, so the trash windows above never start. Microsoft's own newer backup product is kept apart from retention policies for this reason: its documentation says Purview retention and deletion policies "don't affect the backup recovery window".
Rackspace Hosted Exchange, December 2022: the provider itself went down
Ransomware hit Rackspace's hosted Exchange platform on 2 December 2022. Around 30,000 mostly small customers lost email overnight. Rackspace moved them to Microsoft 365 and never rebuilt the service; old mail had to be recovered from the damaged servers as PST files. In its final update on 5 January 2023, a month later, Rackspace said "more than half" of affected customers had some or all of their data available to download, which means a large share were still waiting or had lost part of it. The businesses that came out of it with years of mail intact were the ones with their own copy elsewhere. Google and Microsoft are far larger and better run, but a suspended account, a billing dispute or a compromised admin login produces the same situation: the data is there, and you cannot reach it.
What an outside backup costs for ten people in 2026
Third-party backup copies mail, files, calendars and contacts out of the suite every few hours and keeps versions for a year or longer, outside the policies and recycle bins above. Prices below are per user, checked on 30 October 2026. Where a vendor publishes no list price we say where the figure comes from.
Vault is in the table because it is the first thing Workspace admins are told to buy. It keeps copies of mail and files under retention rules and lets you search and export them for a legal matter. It is not a backup: it cannot put a deleted folder back in Drive or messages back in a mailbox, and a Vault retention rule set wrongly deletes like any other policy.
The worked bill
Take a ten-person office on either suite's Standard plan: $14 per user per month on an annual commitment, $1,680 a year (Microsoft raised Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 on 1 July 2026; Google's Business Standard is $14). Assume an average mailbox of 8 GB, 15 GB of personal Drive or OneDrive files per person and 150 GB in shared drives or SharePoint sites: 380 GB in total.
For ten people the per-seat products win, and the gap widens as data grows: Microsoft's per-GB price is competitive for a light user with a 2 GB mailbox ($3.60 a year of storage) and expensive for a designer with 200 GB of OneDrive ($360 a year for one person). Microsoft also counts the second-stage recycle bin and online archives as protected data, so the bill is usually higher than the visible storage.
What a restore costs: the time, not the licence
The licence is the small number. The expensive part is the hours a team cannot work while a restore runs. Here are the restore times the vendors publish, for the jobs a small office actually does.
Now put a price on the wait. Say the shared drive everyone works from is damaged, the team loses half its output while it is down, and an hour of a person's time costs the business $45. Ten people, eight hours a day:
One slow restore costs as much as ten years of Afi for the whole office. The numbers are ours and the hourly figure will differ for you, but the shape holds: in a ten-person business the backup licence is cheaper than one bad afternoon.
A restore drill you can run this quarter
A backup nobody has restored from is a hope. Cyber insurers know this: applications ask for weekly backups kept separately and whether they are tested, and a "no" can stop a quote. This drill takes about two hours of hands-on time spread over a week. Write down the clock time at each step; the timings are the point.
Two things this drill usually finds. The backup tool's own login has no second factor, or belongs to the one person who set it up; and shared drives or Teams were never added to the backup because the tool only picks up users by default. Fix both the same day.
Before you buy anything: settings that cost nothing
1. Microsoft 365: raise deleted item retention to the 30-day maximum on every mailbox (Set-Mailbox -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30 in Exchange Online PowerShell). It doubles the email window for free.
2. Microsoft 365: set the OneDrive retention for deleted users above the 30-day default in the SharePoint admin centre, and give every user a manager so someone is told before a leaver's files go.
3. Google Workspace: when you delete a leaver, use the transfer option on the delete screen to move their Drive files to a colleague. Gmail is handled separately on that screen, so move or export the mailbox before you confirm, and transfer group calendars too: since early 2026 deleting the owner deletes them.
4. Both: put admin accounts, and the backup tool's account, on hardware keys or an authenticator app. An attacker with an admin login can empty every recycle bin above.
5. Both: write down who removes accounts and when. Most "lost mail" cases in small offices are an account deleted on the leaver's last day, which is why our offboarding checklist below waits until the data is safe before the account goes.
Which to choose
Under about 15 people on Google Workspace, a per-seat tool like Afi or Spanning is the cheapest way to cover the gaps, and it also covers shared drives; skip the Vault upgrade unless you need legal holds. On Microsoft 365 the per-seat tools beat Microsoft 365 Backup on price at this size, but Microsoft's own product has the fastest published restores and sits outside your retention policies, which is worth it if you keep a lot of mail and little in OneDrive. Whatever you buy, run the drill in the month you buy it and again once a year.
Related reading: Offboarding the last day: the accounts, keys and devices a ten-person company takes back covers the account removal that causes most mail loss, and Cyber insurance for a small software company explains what insurers ask about backups and what a claim pays.
Filling in a cyber insurance form? The application check goes through the 15 questions insurers ask, backups included, and shows which answers stop a quote and how long each fix takes. Free, in your browser.
Open the cyber application checkSources
Google: Recover deleted Drive files for users (30-day trash, 25-day admin window, "several days", storage limit); Restore a user's permanently deleted email (25 days after the 30-day trash); Restore a recently deleted user (20 days, up to 24 hours or 5 days); Ransomware detection and file restoration for Google Drive now generally available (March 2026, 25 days). All checked 30 October 2026.
Microsoft: Recoverable Items folder in Exchange Online (14 days default, 30 maximum, calendar 120); Restore items in the recycle bin of a SharePoint site (93 days); OneDrive retention and deletion (deleted users 30 days, then 93 days); Restore your OneDrive (30 days); Overview of Microsoft 365 Backup ($0.15 per GB, restore times, isolation from retention policies); Pricing model for Microsoft 365 Backup (what counts as protected data).
Prices: Afi pricing; Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 on FitGap and Capterra; Spanning on SoftwareReview; Backupify pricing on ITQlick and Datto: understanding the pricing model; Acronis Cyber Protect Backup Advanced Microsoft 365 at CDW; Microsoft 365 business price changes from July 2026 (Office Watch); Google Workspace pricing 2026 (Dupple). Checked 30 October 2026.
Cases: The Register: KPMG Teams chat deletion and Office 365 for IT Pros on the same incident; The Register: Rackspace confirms ransomware, The Register: Rackspace outage customers and TechTarget: Rackspace ransomware actor accessed 27 customers' data. Worked bill and downtime figures: our own model with the assumptions stated above.