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.
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?
- 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!
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?
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.
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.)
- Spanning does a good job for Google Apps and has done their best for Office 365. However, you can't compare Google Apps to Office 365 because things like the Native Data Protection features of Exchange doesn't exist there. It is the existence of features like NDP (if used correctly by tenants) that makes me wonder whether backups are necessary - unless mandated by external influences, such as audit requirements.
- Spanning is a great solution for Backing up Office 365 Mail and OneDrive, very easy to use and restore items and can even give end users access to restore their own backups.
Druva have expanded their Insync product to include OneDrive and Exchange Online. Sharepoint Online and OneDrive for Business are on the roadmap for next year. http://www.druva.com/products/insync/
An interesting point of difference is their product can also backup other Cloud products, local machines, servers and VMS as well as monitor and alert on compliance issues across all of the places a user is keeping data.
Now that NGSC is robust (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/My-compliments-to-One-Drive-for-Business-Next-Generation-Sync/m-p/22238#M405) you can have a full synchronized copy of each users' ODFB on their local PC. I use Carbonite to backup each ODFB full data set to their cloud every day. Carbonite keeps multipe versions of files for up to 3 months, in case you accidentally delete something. In conjunction with that, once a quarter, I back up each local ODFB to a folder on a USB 3.0 hardware encrypted hard drive, which will never be used again. (The folder will never get overwritten. Additional versions of the folder are added each quarter as space permits). So, I always have a point-in-time backup that captures everything on ODFB before anything is deleted by Carbonite. Here's the hard drive that I use: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0A65621/460/DD2DC2671912409D84A59A3EABAD4044
Since these backups never get overritten, the drive will eventually fill up and need to be retired and replaced. You can safely leave them running overnight, because they keypad on the drive accepts a robust encryption key so, if it gets stolen, it will be difficult for them to access the data.
Carbonite is $60 per year per user, so not onerous for a small business, and well worth the backstop. The encrypted drives are around $200 each. Don't know how many you'll need. Depends on space requirement but, again, a valuable backstop.
- Another one is Barracuda for e-mail, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
When it comes to backup Office 365 Backup solutions there you can easily get more than 100 3rd party tool to backup. Among them, each has there own pros and cons. The one I liked was SysTools Office 365 backup & restore tool that helped me to create the backup of office 365 to PST and EML format. This tool is the cheapest tool in the list and one can easily test this utility by downloading the free demo version.
Hi Stephen Mag,
Your contribution is appreciated! :-)
I think the main issue in this topic is that all the tools we find are only partial able to back-up data. Of course, for many companies files and email are still the most important types of data. But as we move more and more to the other tools, we need a back-up tool we can install now and that covers everything across Office 365, not just files and email. We don't want to change back-up tools every year :-)
Yes, I agree with you but investing $19 on SysTools Office 365 Backup & Restore for the unlimited period of time is not a bad idea as it can be useful in various scenarios. Also, it covers most of the things like backup office 365 files, mailboxes, contacts, calendars, manage multiple users accounts, export to PST and EML format, import multiple pst file to office 365.
Hi Stephen Mag, your solution is Exchange ONLY! And only export. For Import you need to buy another tool. :-D
TonyRedmond: One last note here. Throttling is already addressed with App Pools and as I said, scalability through Azure. I'm not convincing you, just sharing some facts. :-) Have a great X-mas time.
One question about Azure... it can be expensive when you start to use many resources. What costs are involved in backing up say 1,000 mailboxes with an average size of 20 GB and 200 sites holding 5 TB of documents?
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
