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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Right, but as long as customers accept the products delivered by backup vendors they won't change. On the other hand, if we demand products that are truly Office 365-aware, we might see some change. A business opportunity exists for a product that can deal with Teams, Planner, and Groups...

@kamo neail that's not a tool that's suitable for any sort of enterprise play. Your post is a form of spam that is simply intended to attract attention to something that is not relevant to the discussion here. How much commission do you get?

Through Office 365 backup program all users can smartly take backup whole office 365 data file to PST, EML and MSG file without any problem .   http://www.purchase-software.org/backup/ms-office-365.html

@devonop paul, forgive me for saying this, but that is a pretty transparent attempt to get some people to buy a tool that is absolutely unsuited for the job in hand.  Exporting user data to a PST as a backup is never a good thing...

Veeam has a backup tool but that's just for Exchange Online. 

Yes, but the SharePoint Online part has a great room for improvement. In regards of a more complete offering I advice Metalogix and Barracuda tools...Metalogix is the most completed one for SPO backups (also ODFB)

AFAIK, the Veeam tool works on the basis of being able to backup data to an on-premises server where the Veeam tools run. This is not the kind of approach that is cloud-friendly. It's OK if you run hybrid environments and use Veeam to support on-premises Exchange, but apart from that...

Thanks for all your answers. Guess the best solution has yet to be created. Allthough the question stays active, my customers seem to be a lot more relaxed about backups then they should be. The customers I had in mind when asking you about this where doing manual "backups" by copying synced document libraries to a external harddrive. Now, I know this isn't the best way, but I assumed they would at least copy the files to a folder named with the backup date and this creating several weeks/months of backups. Apparently, they just copied it to the same folder, overwriting the files... Smiley LOL

 

My biggest fear are crypto virusses, encrypting thousandths of files. As far as I know that would create a situation where you would have to use version history to set back the files manually one by one. There is no possibility to do this in one action for all files...

Restoring previous version of SPO/Onedrive files can be automated with powershell, see this script for example.

Good script for restoring a previous version of the file but you need the file there so I see this script more as an Utility that could complement a backup solution...a backup solution means to be backup and restore a file what means not only the file, but also the metadata & file versions....of course you could also be able to do this by using PowerShell. Indeed those backup tools we are talking about are using behind the scenes the same technology show in the script (for SPO): SharePoint Client Side Object Model
I note that Veeam currently say '*SharePoint Online and OneDrive not supported at this time.'.

I've implemented DocAve Online for SPO and ODFB. It also does EXO, but I've no experience with it.

At the time, we looked at Metalogix and Metavis, but they had only just announced their merger, so I should really look again to see where they went with backup.

I am also looking for a backup tool for my organization, and found this tool that have most of the features we are looking for. Not implemented yet still looking for "the One" all inclusive tool, that do not exist.

Keep it will backup your files and mails. Easy to use for ex support staff.

 

We cover all of your user generated Office 365 data within:

  • Exchange Online (mails, calendar, In-Place Archive, etc.)
  • Sites (SharePoint)
  • OneDrive

Not a complete backup of office365 in all corners as discussed in this. But i covers the restoring of mailbox, sharepoint, onedrive. 

 

If any find this "Backup Office365 all inclusive tool" i would also like to get notified Thanks.

 

 

I see these tools falling more and more behind as Microsoft release more features and services. 

 

An example is Spanning.  As of today it still does not even support SharePoint team sites (just OneDrive sites).  In fact they have not added any functionality in a year.  Based on that alone I think Dell/EMC has no interest in Office 365 backups which tells me, beyond my own experiance, that the market is weak. I only see smaller niche players popping up tyring to fill this need, but no one is even close to a good solution. 

 

When you combine the native administrative controls (Retention policies, Version control, Recycle Bins, Holds, and Alerts) and built in coverage with things like NDP and nightly backups, you can get pretty comprehensive coverage to protect against data loss across Office 365 services. 


 

My biggest fear are crypto virusses, encrypting thousandths of files. As far as I know that would create a situation where you would have to use version history to set back the files manually one by one. There is no possibility to do this in one action for all files...

 

 

The crypto viruses fears me too.

 

I saw that in the admin panel from OneDrive there was an option to exclude files for synchronisation.

Is ithis a first start to exclude files form a crypto locker virus? When there is a list of those extensions you can make a first start.

As far as recovery in this situation you are able to recover files.  In this instance it ecnrypts the files locally, they are synced  and are added as an additoinal version.  So you can roll back to previous version and maintain access to the data. 

 

SharePoint libraries that don't have version control enabled could potentailly still be a target.   In this sitatuion you would be forced to request a restore from Microsoft, and they would resotre the entire site (assuming you notice within a day or two that this occured).   If you let it linger, and you get outside of Microsoft's 14 day backup window, you could potentially lost access to those files. 

 

Even in an instance where something was able to delete files entirley, you still have the abiliyt to restore those.  If you enable legal holds on your data - then copies are kept in hidden libraries in each site, and you have yet another avenue for data restore. 

 

If you have enabled universal auditing (which you should do if you have not), you also can create alerts on certain data actions, such as watching for important files that may be deleted.  This ensures data owners can restore files in a timely fashion.

 

Essentially the only scenerios I can envision where you lose data completley is if something get's a hold of a privlaged account, Remove any holds, adjust retention policies, Deletes files, purges the recycle bin, and no one notices within a 7 day period (so you are at the edge of the abilyt to get a restore from Microsoft).   That alone is a lot to go thru, and you make the hurdle even larger by ensuring all your privlaged accounts have two factor auth enabled.

My boss told me to do research on some Office 365 mailbox backup solutions. Read some good comments on CodeTwo, Cloudally, CloudBacko etc. All seem quite nice, except their prices vary a lot. How do you compare them with SkyKick? Care to share your experience in any of them? Which one is problem-free? Much appreciated :D

I am amazed that Microsoft hasn't yet come up with a backup solution for SharePoint.

 

You mentioned that one could files locked by ransomware by reverting to earlier versions. I didn't think there was a practical way to do this. As far as I know you have to do this one document at a time. If you have thousands, or tens of thousands, of files affected the recovery time would be too long for most companies. If I missed a way to revert multiple files at once please let me know.

 

Without backups the other way you can lose data completely is if someone accidentially deletes files and no-one notices for several months. We have all seen it happen and without some way to backup SharePoint files they are gone forever.

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...

Many thanks for mentioning Barracuda Juan.

 

<Disclaimer: I work for Barracuda>

 

Unlike many solutions, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud backup protects Exchange Online, SharePoint Online AND OneDrive, so offers a complete, one-stop-shop solution for Office 365. You can read more about the solution in our white paper here: -

 

https://assets.barracuda.com/assets/docs/dms/Barracuda_Backup_WP_Complete_Protection_for_Office_365_...

 

If you're looking for more than just backup, Barracuda also offers "Essentials for Office 365", which is a hosted multi-Layer security, backup, archiving & eDiscovery Service.