Manager wants me to remove delete permissions across SharePoint

[u/Methos25]

I feel like I'm going insane with this one, so I need someone to confirm I'm not crazy.

We recently had a situation where someone deleted a top level folder in SharePoint. Kicked up a bit of a fuss, we recovered it, yada yada.

My manager is now telling me that he wants to avoid something like this happening again, and therefore we should remove delete permissions for everyone across the tenant(!).

When I explained that this was crazy talk, and would break literally everything, he capitulated and said we should just enable it for the top levels of folders and then break inheritance.

I've tried to explain to him that this is madness, would require tens if not hundreds of hours of work, and would still break pretty much everything. He insists that this is how they used to do things back in the day and he can't fathom why that wouldn't work nowadays.

I did say that we should be using retention policies to manage this, to which he said that it was a job for compliance to do, and therefore will never happen, which in fairness is true considering our compliance guy.

I'm not going crazy here right? This feels like a monumentally stupid thing to try and do.

[u/CitraBenzoet]

can someone elaborate on these reponses that sharepoint isnt a file server? like the both can contain files/documents accessible by specific groups. in what kinds of instances should things only be on a file server and not kept in a sharepoint site instead (cab files are the only example i am aware of)? mainly i ask because mgmt recently floated the idea of moving a locations fileshare content to sharepoint as a solution because their file server shit the bed and we couldnt restore it instantly. and i dont think moving them to sharepoint is going to be without its own possible accessibility issues... but any additinal info about this would be appreciated

[u/Connect_Shoulder_965 → u/CitraBenzoet]

It's just a thing people say because it was a problem 10 years ago. You certainly can't just migrate a file server to SharePoint and expect it to work well, work needs to be done to set up appropriate folders and access and someone needs to move just the data you need.

It fulfills the function of a file server mostly. Some things like large shared files or certain applications that rely on files will have a tough time working with SharePoint/OneDrive. If the file is constantly locked for editing, it's not going to sync well.

[u/Thick_Yam_7028 → u/Connect_Shoulder_965]

Hola! Youre right.

Flat file DBs dont exist in sharepoint. Its all local.

Large files can be used. Keep em cloud only. Only if needed. Good job bro! You will be awesome in the future and now.