Microsoft is adding a feature to its OneDrive for Business cloud-storage service that will allow users to restore all types of OneDrive files and folders. This feature arrived in late January of 2018, and will be available for all eligible users for use by mid to late February. You can find a release statement on this in the Office 365 Message Center (just look for the messages on January 15, 2018)

The announcement is a huge for people who have held off migrating file and user shares to OneDrive for Business due to the lack of file restore functionality, similar to what you would get by use VSS or third party backup solution on-premises. This could benefit many SMB’s how have a physical or virtual server that is dedicated strictly for file sharing and would like to cut back on their carbon footprint much further.

Per Microsoft, File Restore was designed “enable self-service recovery from disastrous events such as mass deletes, corruption, and other data loss scenarios.” The feature has been discussed by Microsoft executives for the past year, and the solution was originally slated to release in December of 2017.

Files Restore is meant to help customers who may inadvertently delete OneDrive files, have their files corrupted or have their files infected by malware. Files Restore will let users restore their OneDrive for Business to a previous time within the last 30 days. If too many OneDrive files get corrupted or infected, users will have the option of restoring their entire OneDrive for Business to a previous time.

Please note, that this is not a replacement for Version History for OneDrive files, which was launched in Summer of 2017. It is, however, meant to compliment the solution.

More information on this solution can be found here.