Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
I had a conversation about AvePoint Backup with some of their executives last week. AvePoint is the first backup vendor to support Office 365 Groups (except those that use Yammer to hold their conversations), so they get some kudos for that.
Chats in Teams are preserved in Exchange mailboxes - but the problem is that it is impossible to rebuild a conversation from the individual items that constitute a chat without great effort. The metadata about stuff like channels is available through the Graph. All in all, an imperfect situation.
Saying that a solution will scale out perfectly just because it is hosted on Azure conveniently ignores the salient point that backup data must first transit from the customer tenant to Azure. I'm not convinced that this is as scalable as you assert, especially when Office 365 provides no APIs designed to backup data, which means that all backup vendors are forced to use APIs created for other purposes.
So, I am familiar with AvePoint... but while it is better than most, it's still not what I am looking for.
Hi TonyRedmond, since the SaaS solution resides in the same datacenter like the customer's tenant, there are huge bandwidths. Similar to Microsoft's High Speed Migration API, but just the other way around.
For the Team Chats and all around it, again, since there's no API at all, vendors are limited in certain ways.
And sorry to say that, and don't get this personal, but awaiting a "Backup-API" is quite naive in my opinion. What would happen, if developers only use APIs in this way, how the OEM would like to have them used? We would have only 5% of solutions in the market today. Interpreting APIs in different ways made partners like Nintex or Bamboo possible and make solutions like Flow, PowerApps or Bots in Teams useful. Without that, life would be sad :-( ;-)
Happy to further chat with you offline. I don't want to convince, just would like to understand and discuss other ideas and opinions. :-)
Yes, I realize that the Azure datacenters and the Office 365 datacenters are colocated. However, that doesn't guarantee that a backup product can stream information as quickly as you might imagine. Apart from the network paths, there are other limitations, like throttling and API constraints. I would like to see independent proof of throughput.
I'm not waiting for a backup API and do not expect Microsoft to deliver one. After all, their message is that you do not need backups. The point is that all backup vendors depend on whatever APIs exist to stream data out of Office 365 and, if necessary, recover that data in a usable manner. I accept that this is very possible for the basic workloads, but as Office 365 becomes more integrated and more applications are built on top of the fabric (like Teams and Planner), the old-fashioned and on-premises centric notion that backups are necessary becomes less and less valid. IMHO, of course.