Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
Druva have expanded their Insync product to include OneDrive and Exchange Online. Sharepoint Online and OneDrive for Business are on the roadmap for next year. http://www.druva.com/products/insync/
An interesting point of difference is their product can also backup other Cloud products, local machines, servers and VMS as well as monitor and alert on compliance issues across all of the places a user is keeping data.
Now that NGSC is robust (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/My-compliments-to-One-Drive-for-Business-Next-Generation-Sync/m-p/22238#M405) you can have a full synchronized copy of each users' ODFB on their local PC. I use Carbonite to backup each ODFB full data set to their cloud every day. Carbonite keeps multipe versions of files for up to 3 months, in case you accidentally delete something. In conjunction with that, once a quarter, I back up each local ODFB to a folder on a USB 3.0 hardware encrypted hard drive, which will never be used again. (The folder will never get overwritten. Additional versions of the folder are added each quarter as space permits). So, I always have a point-in-time backup that captures everything on ODFB before anything is deleted by Carbonite. Here's the hard drive that I use: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0A65621/460/DD2DC2671912409D84A59A3EABAD4044
Since these backups never get overritten, the drive will eventually fill up and need to be retired and replaced. You can safely leave them running overnight, because they keypad on the drive accepts a robust encryption key so, if it gets stolen, it will be difficult for them to access the data.
Carbonite is $60 per year per user, so not onerous for a small business, and well worth the backstop. The encrypted drives are around $200 each. Don't know how many you'll need. Depends on space requirement but, again, a valuable backstop.
Hi, since end of 2018 (approx.) Carbonite does not offer this tool/option anymore...
I used Carbonite also for many many years, and don't really understand that they stopped with this...
I stopped using Carbonite also... because of this.- Another one is Barracuda for e-mail, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
By the way, the advent of Microsoft Teams has increased the complexity of the challenge of backup for Office 365. The items created in teams now have to be backed up and then reassembled if required. Teams joins Groups, Planner, Office 365 Video, et al. as examples of applications that exist inside Office 365 that don't on-premises, meaning that on-premises backup tools that attempt to expand into the cloud struggle to cope with the full breadth of Office 365.
The net is that current backup products are capable of copying basic data (Exchange, SharePoint) but struggle with the newer parts of Office 365. This might be sufficient for your needs, but I suspect that things will become more complex over time as Microsoft develops more applications to leverage the unique capabilities of Office 365.
Backup vendors - if you have a product that can truly backup the entire data for an enterprise tenant from Exchange to SharePoint to Yammer and the applications cited above to Sway - and is capable of restoring all the data in such a way that the applications work (or at least, sense can be made of the restored data), then I am happy to learn and write about the product. I have been looking for years... and although I see offerings, I don't see point solutions rather an a service-wide answer. Maybe I have been looking in the wrong place?
This actually came up as a topic when we were purchasing DocAve. They mentioned that it's something they're working on (the ability to back up content in Groups), but does not exist yet. None of the vendors can back up the entirety of O365 at this point, because Microsoft does not make it accessible to third parties.
