What’s new with Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive – Ignite 2025

Microsoft

Nov 18, 2025

Organizations are generating more data than ever. Ransomware events continue to rise. AI usage and adoption is growing, and the role of Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive is becoming increasingly important. These services provide resilient recovery at terabyte scale to keep your organization safe, compliant, and operational. With recent regulatory changes like the Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA), it matters more than ever that customers have a fast and practical recovery to provide true resilience. Microsoft 365 Backup provides just that.

At Ignite 2025 this week, we’re announcing new innovations that help our customers get ready for Copilot, ensure their content is relevant, secure, and resilient to meet business continuity and trustworthy AI goals. Catch our session, BRK300 – Copilot readiness & resiliency for your Microsoft 365 content at Microsoft Ignite live on Thurs, Nov 20 at 4:45pm PST. If you’re attending Ignite, join us in person at our session or at the Microsoft 365 booth.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s new. Read on to learn more about each capability.

Departmental billing for Backup – Private preview
Folder/File-level restore with Microsoft 365 Backup – Public preview
Microsoft 365 Backup GCC availability – Public preview
Other Microsoft 365 Backup features now generally available
Microsoft 365 Archive customer highlight

Here’s an updated view of our roadmap for Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive.

Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive roadmap for 2025 and beyond. All timing is for planning purposes and subject to change.

Departmental billing – Private preview

Departmental billing gives you flexibility to connect multiple billing policies to the pay-as-you-go Microsoft 365 Backup offering. This enables each department in your company to use their own Azure subscription to pay for their backup consumption. Departmental billing is coming soon and is also planned for Microsoft 365 Archive in the first half of 2026.

To learn more and request to enroll in the Backup departmental billing preview by filling in and submitting the private preview sign-up form.

Administrator connecting an additional billing policy for Sales department.

Granular restore with Microsoft 365 Backup – Public preview

Folder and file restore gives admins the option to browse and restore individual files and folders within Microsoft 365 Backup. This feature offers:

Enhanced control with selective search and restore options.
Precision recovery, allowing you to recover individual files or folders without rolling back entire workloads—minimizing disruption and saving time.

This capability helps recover from accidental deletions and helps admins perform targeted recovery for a variety of scenarios.

Admin browsing site for individual folders and files to restore

To learn more, check out the Granular restore page.

Microsoft 365 Backup GCC availability – Public preview

A top feature request, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Backup is now available in the Government Community Cloud (GCC). Microsoft 365 in GCC is specifically built to meet the special compliance, security, and operational needs of U.S. government entities. It is designed for federal, state, local, and tribal governments, as well as contractors that handle government-regulated data or are required to meet government standards. This environment ensures compliance with strict U.S. government standards, such as FedRAMP High Impact accreditation.

Additional Microsoft 365 Backup features now generally available

Backup discovery in SharePoint Admin Center

Now it’s even easier for you to discover backup opportunities for your tenant’s SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts right from the SharePoint admin center home page. You can also find the Microsoft 365 Backup solution from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center Home recommendations panel – not shown here.

SharePoint admin discovers gap in backup coverage and learns how to enable it on SharePoint Admin center home page.

Here's an example of Backup discovery within the Active Sites page, one of the most frequented page by SharePoint admins.

SharePoint admin discovers gap in backup coverage and learns how to enable in SharePoint Admin center active sites page.

Dynamic rules

Dynamic rules are generally available today to automatically add/remove user OneDrive accounts and Exchange mailboxes simplifying administration. You can selectively include distribution lists and/or security groups for OneDrive or Exchange Online. Our service will re-evaluate memberships of those lists/groups daily to modify which users are added or removed from the backup policy.

Administrator configures a dynamic rule to automatically define a user’s OneDrive account and mailbox backup policy.

To learn more, check out Dynamic rules.

Multi-admin notification

Multi-admin notification is generally available today via opt-in email to inform you when a potentially dangerous or routine event has occurred within the Backup tool. We recommend enabling this feature to provide better defense in depth against insider attacks.

If an admin with access to the Backup tool performs a potentially dangerous or malicious action, such as triggering an offboarding event or removing a site or user from the protection policy, all admins on the notification list will be notified of that action. Because the Backup tool has an offboarding grace period, another admin can resolve the malicious act before it impacts business operations. Backups, including “air-gapped” ones, are often the first target of a sophisticated attacker. The multi-admin notification feature provides additional checks and balances to keep an organization safe and healthy.

Administrator enables email notifications to multiple people.

To learn more, check out Multi admin notifications.

Microsoft 365 Archive customer highlight

Microsoft 365 Archive provides a cold data storage tier that enables organizations to keep inactive or aging content – and its rich metadata – within SharePoint at a lower price compared to standard SharePoint storage. In addition, Microsoft 365 Archive helps improve Copilot results by removing outdated content from Copilot search.

Let’s look at how one of our customers used Microsoft 365 Archive as part of their Copilot and AI readiness journey.

Dentsu, a global leader in media and creative services, faced mounting challenges in managing the exponential growth of digital assets across its organization. With creativity and collaboration at the heart of its business, Dentsu’s worldwide teams generate vast quantities of content daily, resulting in more than 2 petabytes of data stored in SharePoint. This rapid expansion led to escalating storage costs, operational complexity, and productivity concerns. By adopting Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits, Dentsu not only achieved significant cost savings – cutting SharePoint storage costs by 72%, but also strengthened its governance, security, and AI readiness, helping position the organization for future growth and innovation.

“Microsoft 365 Archive delivered what we needed, a cost-effective archiving solution that keeps content within our core Microsoft 365 environment. The operational simplification alone has been significant. One platform, one set of policies, one user experience.”

— Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms, Dentsu International

Read the full Dentsu and Microsoft 365 Archive customer story to learn more.

Next steps

As organizations continue to evolve in a data-driven world, Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive stand ready to support your Copilot readiness and resiliency journey. We invite you to explore the latest features, join our Ignite session, and take advantage of resources designed to help you unlock the full potential of your Microsoft 365 environment. Thank you for being part of our community – your feedback and engagement drive our ongoing innovation.