Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
Started this question a while back on Yammer. What tools do you use to back-up mail and files stored in Office 365?
The fact that your files are back-upped inside and outside the datacenters of Microsoft only protects you against hardware and software failures on Microsofts side. It will not protect you against accidentally deleted files and mails, which is discovered after 30+ days or after the site trashbins have been emptied.
At least that's what I think. Anyone has an answer? My customers are typically small companies, under 10 users. Sometimes even just 1 to 3.
I use de SkyKick Back-up tools in my own O365 tenant. Which was an offer in the Microsoft Partner Mail recently.
179 Replies
- Don't bother, unless you want a solution that is able to recover individual files. Most if not all of the current backup solutions don't deal well with Office 365 applications. https://www.itunity.com/article/no-good-answers-office-365-backups-3513
- Thank you, nice article!
I recommend UPSAFE. It is an easy handling solution, which allows you to back up all your Google Apps and Office365 features including Mail, OneDrive, People, Calendar, SharePoint. Unlike most of the competitor's solutions and free back up services, UpSafe offers unlimited storage capacity with no retention limit, which includes revisions as well. Moreover, it is convenient and instinctive tool both for final users and administrators.
As an administrator, you will have full control on the backed up features, users subscription, access and use of the solution. You can activate and deactivate users, enable and disable services, control the back up deletion and have a clear view on history and payment. Users will have fast and easy access to their data in case of loss of wrong manipulation, as well as all revisions they might need to recover.
Furthermore, the price is highly competitive with only $2 per user per month.
It's only a pitty they don't backup the Archive boxes :-(
We are looking for a backup solution for O365, that cab backup to a local storage (NAS or SAN) and have the restore capabilities. I have been talking to many vendors and everyone seems to have a solution for cloud to cloud backup. can someone tell me is this even possible??
I looked at Synology today they have active backup office 365. Do anyone know about it, Please throw some light on it.
(we have 700+ users active on O365, and a very active SPO sites.)
When we were using Google Apps a few years back Spanning was the best backup solution we came across and was the insurance for accidentally deleted files in our organization. It has great functionality especially the different options for restoring data and they have released a version for backing up Office 365 data (only Email, Calendar and OneDrive unfortunately). Another contender is Backupify, which started as a consumer backup service but moved into the enterprise space. They offer a backup solution for Office 365 too and have the advantage of backing up folders and SharePoint in addition to Email, Calendar and OneDrive. We have the backup problem on our roadmap, but it has a low priority so we haven't started planning or testing yet, but maybe these options are of interest.
There is not a good story around this at present. Most tools are extensions from the on-prem counterpart. So you can find good SharePoint backups, but mail is usually non-existent, or not that flexible, and vice versa. Further with the integration, you have complications of some data, in regards to how to restore it (o365 Groups, Planner, etc). Beyond SharePoint and Exchange, you have stuff like data in Azure AD, Yammer, O365 Video, and PowerBI which as far as I know are not addressed by any product at present. Most if not all of them fall short in terms of eDiscovery as well. You also have to consider how the backup products keep up with changes to the service as Microsoft updates API's or adds services that complicate the backup and restore processes.
Based on the size of your customers, I find it hard that you are able to sell an additional service at all. The value prop is almost non-existant. The native tools you have can protect against accidental deletion in most cases. If they are having issues with people manually cleaning up recoverable items folders, or SharePoint recycle bins, there is a larger issue at play as that is willfully circumventing the tools meant to protect from these scenarios. You can leverage the legal hold features if their tenant supports them to provide an additional layer or protection as well. I would not do this on every SharePoint site, but with high value content, you could do that and documents are copied into a hidden library.
You are not without "Backups" entirely when relying on Microsoft. SharePoint is backed up every 12 hours and data kept for 14 days. You don't get item level restores, but you can request a site collection be restored. For Exchange, it can be scary to think Microsoft does not use backups, but they do keep lagged copies, so that in the event of an issue, they can swap your databases to a time previous when an issue was detected. You can't request this change directly, but it's there.
The real benefit of a 3rd party, is in the peace of mind it gives some people. But in almost all cases just a little education up front can avoid most of this complication. Let's face it whether it's Microsoft, Google, Amazon or any other cloud service, you have to trust them with your data and that their processes and systems will protect you from data loss. I find Microsoft services to be very reliable, and I generally feel more confident about the data there than I do in a lot of customers local SharePoint deployments.
Thank you! I agree it's hard to make a case with an organisation of just 2 users. They have 2 user mailboxes and use the default teamsite with several document libraries to store documents. I could just setup one of their computers to synchronize al libraries and create a weekly (?) back-up using the native back-up tool in Windows.
But it's the peace of mind your talking about that makes me think about getting an Office 365 back-up tool. Because, what if they start using multiple teamsites and forget to add them to the Onedrive synchronization and thus the back-up. And also the fact that mail isn't back-upped at all.
The tool I got through the Microsoft Partner Network, SkyKick Back-up, would cost €5,- per seat per month. So in the case of my customer with 2 users it would cost them €10,- a month, to have a full (6 times a day) back-up of all their SharePoint and Onedrive file storage and all their Exchange mailboxes. But does it cover what they need (I think so, cause they are doing everything with files :) ) and is that worth €240,- a year?
BTW: I'm not worried about the default back-up of Office 365 by Microsoft. So the back-up solution I'm looking for has everything to do about accidentally deleting files. Or, more important, the fact that a virus can corrupt or encrypt files. I think that is my primary fear: how do I protect my customers against cryptovirusses? Cause I don't believe Microsoft is protecting against that?
DocAve. I have Metavis/Metalogix and it is terrible for backup.
- Tnx. Metavis/Metalogix aren't looking very promising indeed. But I can't get a good feeling about back-up functionality in DocAve either. Am not looking for a lot more then back-up. What about pricing? What do we consider an acceptable pricing model?
