Surprise! Windows Backup Will Soon Exfiltrate Your Corporate Data

Yet Another Feature You Never Asked For

Along with the arrival of Windows 11 26H2, unless you are in the EU, comes yet another way Microsoft will help you violate your client agreements.  Unless you have specifically disabled Windows Backup in Intune or via a GPO, Windows Backup will start saving your “Users’ settings and Microsoft Store app list are captured out of the box“.   If you have simply left the Windows Backup settings as ‘Not Configured’, Microsoft will helpfully enable it for you.

You can toggle the setting on Intune via a configuration policy under Administrative Templates in Windows Components > Sync your settings.  If you’re still rocking GPOs, you need to tweak HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup by adding a DWORD called DisableMonitoring with a value of 1. If you modify these settings, Microsoft promises they will honour it and not change it on you but you might want to check.

Those running their own machines can also disable this via GPO, at least for now.