Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
We usehttps://www.keepit.com/backup-microsoft-office-365/, selected it as will backup everything on office 365, emails. SharePoint, teams etc.
Not had much need for restore, but when needed it works well.
Taking another run at this topic...
Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn't simple because technology changes all the time and it's hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don't exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.
TonyRedmond Appreciate all your advice thus far. I'm still in the search for an O365 backup partner that provides point-in-time restore and a good partner portal - monthly billing would be a plus. A scenario that has happened a couple times with our clients (we use SkyKick) is that their files are corrupted (an extension was added) to all files and a backup of the corrupted file was taken. Are there any useful backup solutions that address this that you've found? I'm currently evaluating spanning but they don't have the partner tools quite ready that I'm looking for.
Check out what Commvault has to offer, we fully support EXO, SPO, OneDrive, and Project server with indirect support for Teams data (which the bulk of is stored in EXO, SPO, & OneDrive). Until Microsoft provides a API for Teams to backup and restore the data no vendor will be able to provide direct Teams restore support.
Commvault offers SaaS\BaaS also on a subscription and has many partners\MSP too.
https://commvault.com/office-365
Disclaimer: I work for Commvault, have for the last four years but have worked with Exchange since 1996 and was an Exchange\Office 365 MVP for 12 years. I work hard to keep Commvault marketing honest ;)
My current favorite backup products for Office 365 are AvePoint and Spanning. Both companies are realistic about what they can and cannot backup. I still remain unconvinced that backups are needed if you deploy the full set of features built into Office 365, but if you think you want the comfort of backups, try either of the two above.
Excellent article. I agree that the key is to ignore the hype and focus on data loss scenarios and see what gaps might exist.
The gap that concerns me, and is not discussed in the article, is how to deal with files, or emails, that may have been inadvertently deleted some time ago. I am not aware of a way, other than third party backups, to deal with this.
It probably happens once or twice a year that someone will go to our IT group and say that some files or folders are missing from our fileserver. They swear that they were there a month (or a year, or 5 years) ago so someone must have accidentally deleted them. With our onsite backups it usually takes less than an hour to restore the files (or prove that they weren't there to begin with).
If someone asked the same thing about files they thought were on a SharePoint site a year ago I wouldn't have an answer for them. If retention policies can deal with this scenario I haven't been able to figure it out. When I last tried I found that there wasn't a reliable way to find and restore the files or folders. (It doesn't help that people won't remember the exact names of the files or folders).
I would like to avoid a third party backup solution if I can but users expect, not unreasonably, that something is in place to protect against accidental deletion even if it happened quite a while ago.
You could use retention policies to make sure that mailbox items and documents are not removed for a certain period. For instance, keep everything for at least five years and then delete them. Once a retention policy is in place, users can't remove items until the retention period expires.
