Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
John,
thank you for feedback. Our customers have to physically own backups of their Office 365, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Office Groups, and Microsoft Teams documents for compliance, restore of certain missing files, or disaster recovery reasons. It's easy to run 3rd party tools as the Layer2 Cloud Connector as a Windows Service locally or in the customer's own Azure to automatically pull any changed file on a regular base, e.g. each hour. The effort and resource usage is very low. You can than use commercial backup tools to add the Office 365 files to the existing file server or NAS backup, or use the Windows File History to keep any changed file version separately (thats the base-practice advise in my opinion).
You can also go one step further and setup a two-way sync using the above connector. Note that this is not only for files, it's for list content (from SQL/ERP/CRM) as well.
Hoep that helps, Regards - Frank.
Of course, if you take file-level backups of Office 365 data, it will work nicely for SharePoint and OneDrive documents but fail horribly if the need exists to reconstitute the more integrated entities such as Groups, Teams, Planner, and StaffHub. File-level backup is, IMHO, old-world on-premises kind of backup. A dramatically different, application-sensitive, approach is needed for Office 365. So far, AvePoint is the only company I have seen take any step in this direction to deal with Office 365 Groups (but only the type that use Exchange to hold conversations, not the Yammer type).
If the community accepts the old-world file-level approach to backup the backup vendors will not change. We need to ask for more. Which I do, frequently. My hope is that I will see real progress when I tour the technology exhibit at Ignite next September... I hope...