Back-up tools for Office 365

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Iron Contributor

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.

180 Replies

Tony,

 

I totally agree regarding the missing context. Tools, such as the Layer2 Cloud Connector or others, will not provide the perfect recovery for a collaboration environment after some disaster. But it could help to meet some (yes, old-fashioned) compliance rules by allowing to physically own the documents as required in some cases. Document synchronization could also help to manage a transition period, where traditional file shares cannot be removed for any reason.

We have been using Barracuda Essentials for a while since it also office Email Archive and a range of email scanning options. 

That being said, we keep getting told by them that there is a delay in backups of new SPO Team Sites that have the Group#0 template due to Microsoft API not being updated yet. Has anyone else been experiencing this issues with new SPO team sites? 

The Group#0 template has been around since November 2014. Sounds like Barracuda isn't doing such a great job at keeping up with Office 365. But how would a template affect their ability to backup documents from a site?

From what their dev team have told me, it is due to the new Team setup with an O365 Group and the template in use. my exact response was the same as you, I don't see why the web template is effecting the backup capabilities but that was the reason I was given.

 

From your experience, is there any application out there that would offer an all in one backup solution to include OD4B, SPO and Exchange online? 

I hesitate to make recommendations, but I have seen large companies use the Spanning backup product for EXO, SPO, and OD4B. AvePoint can handle Office 365 Groups too. Skykick also seems to be popular. No backup product that I know can handle Teams (the chats) or Planner. 

 

My recommendation is to secure a test version of multiple products and try them out in your environment. Don't run a test for 10 users - try 100 to make sure that the product can deal with large volumes of data - and always try to restore data too. Many can copy, but a seamless restore is much more difficult.

Great post, @Tony Redmond! Backup is not even half of the story. You really need to run restore tests on regular basis.

 

Just a note for AvePoint, which now also supports Teams. However, since there's still no API for Planner, this part of a Group/Team cannot be covered. Instead, Project Online, Exchange Public Folders and Dynamics 365 are covered.

 

However, for all readers here: please vote on Microsoft user voice to implement (API) support for Microsoft planner (https://office365.uservoice.com/). Please also share other needed features there. Microsoft seems to have doubts users really want to backup and restore planner content. I found one interesting request for that: https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/289138-office-365-security-compliance/suggestions/16988467-pl...

I would like to recommend Kernel Office 365 Backup & Restore software to backup Office 365 data and save them in PST formats.

Yet another attempt by people who would like to persuade Office 365 tenants to export/backup data to PSTs to hoodwink their intended victims. I admire your persistence, but backing up to PSTs is a bad, bad, bad, idea except in specific circumstances (like eDiscovery export to give data to external investigators).

Finally we were going into the right direction again, because @Tony Redmond made again clear, exporting Exchange is NOT an office 365 backup!!! However, unfortunately @shiv Gupta did not make her homework and don't understand the business requirements of real companies in times of security and GDPR.

 

Again, don't get trick by people, who name their Exchange export engines Office 365 backups! Office 365 is an entire suite of several products, where you can store content. It's not only Exchange! Ideally your solution should cover at least most of it (SharePoint, OD4B, Groups, Teams, Exchange). Tony mentioned some example solutions, which can do this. Also, PST is not an reliable backup format, especially in times of data security.

 

Please also refer to Analyst houses Gartner and/or Forrester for further details. Especially to all, who want to recommend an Exchange export engine again: Please do your homework!

Well, thank you for your marketing text on behalf of Veeam...

 

Seriously, posting stuff like this in a technical community is pretty worthless. If you have real-life experience of running this technology in a production environment, then it would be good to hear of those experiences... but to go through a bland recital of Veeam PR (including references to "on-premise") doesn't create a convincing case.

Thanks, Tony, I've removed their post as it violates our guidelines.

Hi Everyone,

Wondering if anyone found a solution to backup Office 365 Team data (talking about the files and folder data stored on SharePoint). Lot of these Office 365 Cloud solution say the do, we test and nope only SharePoint Site collections but not the Team data. Anyone?

It's quite the way we have to back this data right now - Use OneDrive Sync  to locked Windows 10 system and do a backup to an Azure Storage via Backup software

Cheers

The files and folder data for the Files section of a team are held in a SharePoint site collection. Therefore, any backup product that can process a site collection should be able to process the information belonging to a team. Certainly the leading backup vendors for SharePoint all can. And if someone doesn't know that Teams uses site collections, you shouldn't be talking to that vendor.

Tony, you are absolute wrong. Check your permissions and you will see that there are different. And believe me - I tested several of those Cloud Backup provides - skykick, itcloud and others an NOBODY can as of now backup Team Data sites. If you check your Teamsites will NOT show in your Site collection under Share Point Administrator. We have quite some clients and I would say being close to 30 years in this industry I ensure and confirm information I post. So check it out - You will NOT backup the data from Teamsites just because the back end is SharePoint

cheers

No, they are site collections. If you look in the new version of the SharePoint Admin Center, you'll see that all of the site collections created by Office 365 Groups and Teams are there. Right now, I'm looking at > 200 of them...

 

The history is that the old SharePoint Admin Center didn't expose these collections because they were hidden, but they have been available to access for quite a while. AvePoint has a backup module for Office 365 Groups that can process these site collections quite nicely (I wrote about this feature in March 2017 - see https://www.petri.com/avepoint-backup-office-365-groups - also see https://www.avepoint.com/blog/office-365/backup-office-365-groups/). I believe Metalogix has too, but I could be wrong (https://www.metalogix.com/help/Essentials/WebHelp/creating-an-office-365-group-b.html indicates that they do). I believe Spanning can handle these site collections too.

 

And as to 30+ years in the industry and checking before saying something... Well, everyone can be wrong. I am frequently. But when I publish something, I do take care to collect facts first. If I didn't, I don't think I could have published as much as I have done over the last 35+ years...

Hi @P H,

 

@Tony Redmondis actually right. Each Group and Team has an own site collection to store the files. However, not all cloud backup solutions understand this! Hence, you did right and tested it to make sure, there're no surprises.

 

Sure, I'm working for AvePoint, but as an MVP I'm an independent consultant, too. Veeam, Skykick or Backify are cloud backup solutions, which should provide Groups backup. However, for my current information, right now only AvePoint really supports backup + restore for Groups and since May also Teams (including Chat). I don't say, this is the best solution, I just want to say, try it out yourself and compare. :)

I don't consider backups to be a necessity for Office 365, but ISVs continue to offer these products and customers continue to buy, so I chatted with Spanning to find out what's happening in the Office 365 market, who's using cloud backups, and why. We also spoke about the challenges that backup vendors continue to have in coping with some of the unique aspects of Office 365.
https://www.petri.com/spanning-office-365-backups

Tony, why you do not consider backup as a necessity for O365? Microsoft provides good SLAs for infrastructure underlying O365. But if a user accidentally deletes a message in his Outlook - Microsoft might help you to restore it any time during next 48 hours. And if you need it now - you're out of luck.

Or even worse - if a rogue IT person decides to delete e-mails in few mailboxes.

 

Disclaimer: I work for Acronis (data protection company).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fair question.

 

Use retention policies to make sure that information is retained for a reasonable period, so if someone "loses" a message, you can always recover it. This protects against rogue admins too.

 

For SharePoint, put a classification label on important documents that has a retention period. People won't be able to delete the document because the label is there. And if they remove the label, then this is a pretty explicit deletion  and they better understand what they are doing.