The Legal Risks of Using Litigation Hold Instead of Proper Backups
Why Litigation Hold Is Often Not Understood
A lot of businesses use Microsoft 365’s Litigation Hold instead of real backups, thinking it will keep all their data safe. Litigation Hold is a great way to make sure you follow the rules, but it was never meant to be a backup system. If you treat it like one, you put yourself at serious legal, operational, and financial risk.
The purpose of Litigation Hold is to keep data safe for legal and regulatory reasons, not to make sure that data can be quickly, reliably, or flexibly recovered. Businesses that want to stay compliant and keep their operations running smoothly need to know the difference between these two things.
What Litigation Hold Does in Real Life
Litigation Hold stops mailbox data from being permanently deleted, even if a user deletes items or empties folders. The information is kept in hidden places on the system so that it can be used for eDiscovery.
Some important things about Litigation Hold are:
- Keeps data safe for legal review
- Keeps deleted items in a state that users can’t access
- Retention is based on legal or compliance needs
- Not made for recovery after an operation
It is not a way to recover; it is a way to make sure you follow the rules.
Why Litigation Hold Is Not a Backup
A good backup system lets businesses quickly, selectively, and safely restore data. Litigation Hold does not have these features.
Some important limitations are:
- No easy way to restore emails, files, or mailboxes
- No recovery at a specific time
- No simple way to go back after ransomware or mass deletion
- No protection from tenant-level hacking
Businesses are at risk when they only rely on Litigation Hold because it gives them false confidence.
Legal Risks of Using Litigation Hold as a Backup: Not Being Able to Meet Recovery Obligations
Litigation Hold doesn’t guarantee quick recovery if important data is lost because of user error or cyber incidents. In regulated industries, not restoring data quickly can break contracts or service-level agreements.
If you can’t get to business records right away, it can make legal disputes worse and make you more responsible.
More exposure during eDiscovery
Organizations may have to use complicated eDiscovery exports to get data back if they don’t have good backups. This is how it works:
- Takes a lot of time
- Costly
- Likely to make mistakes
During a lawsuit, giving too much or too little information can make you more legally liable.
Problems with data integrity and the chain of custody
Litigation Hold keeps data safe, but it doesn’t check to make sure that the data is still correct for operational recovery. When businesses try to piece together information from preserved items, they face the risk of:
- Not enough context
- Bad metadata
- Records that aren’t complete
These gaps can make it harder to defend yourself in court and get good audit results.
Risks of ransomware and insider threats
Litigation Hold doesn’t keep you safe from ransomware like backups do. Litigation Hold may also keep the encrypted versions if the data is changed in a bad way or encrypted.
Insider threats can also:
- Bad data
- Change files before you delete them
- Leave organizations with records that are still there but can’t be used
There aren’t many ways to recover if you don’t have clean, restorable backup copies.
Being compliant does not mean being resilient
A lot of compliance teams think that keeping data safe means the company is safe. This is a risky assumption.
Retention that focuses on compliance:
- Meets the requirements for legal preservation
- Does not guarantee the business will continue
- Doesn’t help with operational recovery
For true resilience, you need both compliance controls and backups that are separate from each other.
Why Making Backups the Right Way Lowers Legal Risk
A modern backup solution gives you:
- Restore specific items in small pieces
- Before incidents, clean up recovery points
- Storage that is not part of the Microsoft 365 tenant
- Faster answers to audits and legal requests
Backups lower the risk of legal problems by making sure that data is both safe and useful.
Best Practice: Use Backups and Litigation Hold Together
Layered protection is the safest way to go:
- Litigation Hold for keeping legal records
- Backups that are separate from the main system for recovery
This separation makes sure that legal requirements are met without making it harder to recover or putting people at more risk during incidents.
What Happens If You Get This Wrong
When organizations use Litigation Hold as a backup in the wrong way, they often run into:
- Long periods of downtime
- Audits that didn’t work
- Higher legal costs
- Fines from the government
- Customers and partners losing trust in you
The costs of setting up the right backup systems are much lower than these problems.
Strategic Advice for Business Leaders
Business and IT leaders should:
- Make sure that compliance and backup plans are very different from each other
- Make sure backups are separate from the production tenant
- Regularly test restores
- How to recover documents and respond to legal issues
This clarity keeps both the legal status and the stability of operations safe.
About the Epis Technology
Epis Technology helps businesses avoid problems with compliance and recovery by providing enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud backup, and data protection solutions. The company focuses on Microsoft 365 backup architectures, granular restore solutions, air-gapped and immutable storage designs, and planning for business continuity. Epis Technology helps businesses lower their legal risk, make sure they can recover quickly, and keep their data protection practices legal and defensible by separating Litigation Hold from real backup strategies.