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.

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I don`t like that idea either. If you insist on using a backup with Office 365, do yourselves a favor and sign up for one of the cloud-based backup services. Given the volume of messages created and used inside Office 365 today with 100 GB mailboxes and auto-expanding archives, it`s not feasible to use PSTs or individual files. And before you go for a backup solution, ask why you need it, how much it will cost, and how it will add value to your business. 

Hi, someone already used de veeam tool V2 that just came out for making a backup of the whole Office 365 suite(sharepoint,exchange,onedrive,..)? I'm looking for a good solution, Cloud or on prem, but for on prem we should probably use Veeam. 

 What about the speed of recovering a whole mailbox with Skykick? 

 

regards!

Veeam doesn't do the whole of the Office 365 suite. It just does the basic workloads (Exchange, SharePoint, Online).

 

Veeam® Backup for Microsoft Office 365 eliminates the risk of losing access and control over your Office 365 data including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business – so that your data is always Hyper-Availableand protected.

https://go.veeam.com/backup-office-365

 

I remain patiently waiting for a backup vendor that can truly process the entire spectrum of Office 365...

So Skykick isn't the whole solution also..? for starting a backup of Exchange/onedrive/sharepoint/teams would be a good startpoint. 

The basic workloads are a good start, but remember that you're unlikely to change your backup solution once you choose one.

 

And Skykick does basically the same: https://www.skykick.com/product-descriptions/backup-1607/

Set Up:

  • Cloud Backup discovers all current Office 365 data available for backup
    • Exchange Online mailboxes and public folders
    • SharePoint Online sites
    • OneDrive for Business accounts

They mention Teams and Office 365 Groups, but that is just the group mailbox and files.

 

Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams      
Deleted item retention 30 days Unlimited Unlimited
Mailbox Storage Capacity (Conversations & Calendar) 50 GB Unlimited Backup 50 GB + Unlimited Backup
Data Storage Capacity (Files & Notebook) 1 TB Unlimited Backup 1 TB + Unlimited Backup
Backup and restore Conversations, Calendar, Files, and Notebook  

Just to share another vendor: AvePoint.
Attached are the currently supported content sources.

AvePoint-CloudBackup.png

The mentioned scope is one thing. Other things to consider:

- is geo-replication supported?

- what backup storage types are supported (Azure, AWS, SFTP, etc.)?
- does your vendor support release rings (for testing)?

- is access to backup data audited and security trimmed?
- how can end users restore their content, e.g. with a Teams-Bot
- Is your vendor ISO 27001 certified?
- does your vendor provide "Right to be forgotten" capabilities in regards to GDPR?

Just some points, AvePoint also supports.

 

These are just some questions you should ask yourself and your SaaS Vendor, when deciding for an Office 365 backup solution.

Could you share your insights on comparing multiple vendors, specifically Spanning Back-up? One of my clients wants to back-up (the basic workloads are all they use at the moment). They have an offer to start using Spanning Backup. I have no idea how they are compared to other vendors, in features, trustworthiness and GDPR compliancy.

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.

Backup Office 365 email to PST with AES 256-bit encryption using EdbMails Office 365 Backup  Software (third party link removed by moderator)

 

try this above tool. It is user-friendly tool with good GUI and It has lot of features. you can also try to migrate your files to Office 365 and Live Exchange Server without any interruption. 

 

Office-365Backup.jpg

Anyone who backs up Office 365 email to PSTs without some good reason (like the need to provide copies of messages for legal discovery) needs to have their head examined. If you insist on backing up Exchange Online, use a cloud service - don't put your backups into one of the most fragile and easily cracked file formats on the planet. Learn from companies like Sony, who suffered huge reputational loss when hackers penetrated their systems and recovered tons of sensitive email from PSTs...

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.

 

https://www.petri.com/determining-need-office-365-backups

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. 

Commvault supports backing up /managing O365 and enabling O365 content to be searched for E-Discovery along with other Azure, cloud and on-premise data enabling O365 content to be part of a heterogeneous, enterprise-wide, storage-agnostic E-Discovery/Search solution. 

 

Often times we will also leverage our Azure integration as a storage depot and compute engine as part of the solution. Happy to discuss more.

 

https://www.commvault.com/partners/microsoft/office-365-backup 

@Tony Redmond 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. 

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.

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 ;)

Spamming to push a product that is really of no use to anyone who wants to backup Office 365 in any serious manner.

@jarvinel Thank you for the unadulterated vendor pitch.

 

The facts of the matter are that a) Exchange Online uses Native Data Protection to limit the need for backup and b) if you do want backups, it is best to use a properly-managed cloud backup service than to depend on user-driven backup to local files that are insecure and easily corrupted.