Introducing Protection Unit Offboarding in Microsoft 365 Backup
We’re excited to announce that Protection Unit Offboarding (aka backup deletion) is now available! This feature empowers organizations to manage their backup data with greater precision, compliance, and control. Why does this matter? It’s been a popular request from customers and ISV partners to delete specific SharePoint sites or OneDrive accounts, particularly in scenarios involving compliance, cost management, and operational agility. Up until now, Microsoft 365 Backup only supported product-level offboarding—meaning you could discontinue the service or switch providers, but not delete backups at the individual SharePoint site, Exchange mailbox, or OneDrive account level. This posed challenges for customers needing to do the following: Meet regulatory requirements for deleting personally identifiable information (PII) when users leave. Correct accidental data inclusion due to automation or manual errors. Adapt to changing business policies, such as discontinuing Exchange backups while retaining SharePoint. Purge backups when transferring to a new provider. Manage licenses and costs by removing unnecessary protection units. What’s available in Protection Unit Offboarding (aka backup deletion)? Here’s a quick summary of what’s available in this new feature: Targeted deletion: Delete backups at the protection unit or policy level, reducing storage costs and supporting compliance. Error prevention: Avoid accidental retention of data from automation or manual mistakes. Business agility: Easily adapt backup configurations as your needs evolve. Admin overview Admins can initiate backup deletion for single or multiple protection units using Microsoft Graph APIs or PowerShell Cmdlets—enabling end-to-end automation and seamless integration into existing workflows. Guardrails for security and compliance Grace periods: All purge requests have a grace period (typically 30–90 days) for review or cancellation. Notifications: System-generated alerts keep admins informed at every stage. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Only authorized admins can initiate offboarding. Audit events: Every action is logged for compliance and traceability. How to offboard a site, mailbox, or OneDrive Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to using this backup capability: Identify the protection unit: Use Microsoft Graph API or PowerShell to find the correct protection unit ID. Remove from policy: Unassign the unit from any backup policy to set its state to unprotected. Initiate offboarding: Use the offboard API or PowerShell cmdlet to start the process. Notifications will be sent. Monitor grace period: Review or cancel the request if needed. All actions are logged. Confirm deletion: After the grace period, the unit and backups are permanently deleted. Attempting to access deleted data will confirm successful offboarding. For detailed technical steps and troubleshooting, refer to Protection Unit Level Offboarding page and Protection Unit Level Offboarding Microsoft Graph APIs page on Microsoft Learn. What’s next? This feature is now generally available for all Microsoft 365 Backup customers. Haven’t set up Microsoft 365 Backup yet? Get started today! Future enhancements will include partial purges, bulk actions by department or region, exclusion lists, and improved notifications. Stay tuned! - Diksha Upadhyay Diksha is a Senior Product Manager on the Microsoft 365 Backup teamMicrosoft 365 Archive Public Preview?
Hi all, Has anyone heard from Microsoft on the timeline for the public preview for M365 Archive? We're reviewing similar solutions from AvePoint but our interest in a native archiving tool is also very high, but we do have project deadlines to meet - hence my interest in double checking when this should be available for customers who have expressed interest earlier this year through the Syntex "register for more info" form?
SharePoint online backup tool which will cover all the scenarios
We manage many office 365 tenants and we are looking for a backup tool for SharePoint online, which support those main points:- Backup and restore whole lists and libraries’ items OR single item/s, page/s and document/s which have the following features:- Major and minor versioning. Versions history. Preserve their Metadata (created, modified, created by and modified by) after the restore. Custom list views Custom list forms. Such as custom display, create and edit list forms Custom page layouts. Such as custom page layouts inside enterprise wiki site collections. Approval enabled (pending, rejected and approved). Workflow 2013 which are linked to lists and libraries. Backup and restore external users added to SharePoint groups or added to files. Custom permissions for items, pages, documents and lists/libraries Managed metadata columns which are linked to term sets Backup and restore managed metadata service. Including Groups, term sets and terms Backup and restore search service, including built-in and custom crawl properties and managed properties. Backup and restore single SharePoint groups, including their members, settings? Different Backup and Restore levels which still satisfy point-1:- Item, page and document level List or library level Site level (root site or sub site) Site collection level Ability to backup private SharePoint modern team sites, which by default cannot be accessed by office 365 admin. Backup and restore modern pages which have versioning enabled and which are linked to custom columns. When restoring a list or library to preserve its custom content type Backup and restore classic and modern site collections (team sites and communication sites). Backup and restore all the non-SharePoint components inside SharePoint modern team sites. Including the office 365 email address, calendar & conversations. Backup and restore Microsoft teams and office 365 groups, as those 2 components will have a SharePoint modern team site provisioned for them. The ability to restore the site collection on different url. Finally are there any restriction or limitations we might face when backuping and restoring SharePoint components (mainly on item, page, document, list, library, root site, sub-site and site collection) or we can find a tool which will satisfy all the cases?Is this a good SharePoint SQL Backup and Maintenance Plan Strategy?
Hi all Looking for some guidance. Setting up SharePoint SQL Backups for the first time and maintenance plans. Is this a good strategy in general even if there is no company policy yet defined? Environment has 2 SQLs VMs on a Microsoft Failover Cluster hosted split over 2 ESXi hosts connected to a SAN. (Cluster Shared Volume in use for SQL Data, SQl Log and SQL Backup volume). General DB Maintenance Task Check Database Integrity (All databases include indexes) Rebuild indexes (All databases, tables, views, orig amount of free space) Update Statistics Task (Full scan all DB and tables and views, existing statistics) History Clean Up Task (Backup Job and Maintenance plan. Age older than 4 weeks) Maintenance Cleanup of Reports (Age older than 4 weeks) 12:01AM Sunday Full Backup - (compress, backup set expires after 14 days). Databases (All) Weekly - 1AM Sunday Differential Backup - (compress, backup set expires after 7 days) Databases (All except Master and Tempdb) Daily - 2AM excl Sunday Transaction Backup - (compress, backup set expires after 1 day) Databases (Content, SharePoint_Config and SharePoint_AdminContent) Daily - Every 15 Minutes Full Backup cleanup Weekly - 2:30AM Sunday Diff Backup cleanup Weekly - 3AM Sunday Log backup cleanup Daily - 4 AMCan we restore a corrupted farm from the backups we have for sharepoint databases
One of our customers use to have a sharepoint enterprise farm 2013, with the following architecture:- 1. windows 2008 R2 which contain sharepoint on-premises farm 2013. 2. windows 2008 R2 which contain Sql Server. Our customer was backup-ing the sharepoint databases on daily basis, while the sharepoint application server was not backup-ed or even tracked. and the application server had a sever damage and they could not restore it. so now our customer have a full backup for all the sharepoint databases including; content database, managed metadata databases, configuration database, etc... But per my knowledge is that to be able to integrate a new sharepoint farm with existing databases, the farm need to be on the same farm build number + have the same sharepoint patches installed as the source farm... but in our customer case these info (farm build number + patches involved) are not available. So i have these 2 questions:- 1. Is there a way from the databases' backups we have to build a new farm which works on these databases? 2. Now our customer have a valid license for sharepoint and the windows server, so can we open a ticket with Microsoft regarding this? and will Microsoft cover such scenarios? where we need to build a new SharePoint farm which work on existing databases?
The standard backup/restore options aren't enough for SPO
Recently, a client contacted me to ask for help with a workflow that they'd been using, quite successfully, to manage a very important business process on SP Online. The workflow gathered evaluation data measuring the effectiveness of a key service their business provided, and naturally enough they wanted to retain the data for reporting purposes. The problem, though, was that the evaluation data was stored in workflow tasks... and SharePoint helpfully cleans up workflow association data and related tasks 60 days after the workflow completes. ... !!! So 60 days after every evaluation completed, the important data that was gathered was deleted. The customer was not expert in SharePoint Online, and was simply using the tools SPO offered to provide value for their business. The rationale behind the design decisions is easy to understand, the crucial piece missing was either a deep dive into SharePoint's technical documentation or consultation with an expert before going live. Normally, you'd think "check the Recycle Bin, we've got 93 days before it's truly deleted." However, in this case, since the deletion happens as part of the workflow cleanup job, it appears that the tasks are just deleted. Not sent to the Recycle Bin. If this had been SharePoint Server, the behavior would have been the same, but the customer would have had more options, because they would be in possession of their data and their backups. But when we got in contact with Premier Support to see if there was a chance the data was retained in a cold storage backup or some such, we were given the standard line of site collection backups being retained for 14 days and then deleted. No options, no data, no luck. I wanted to post this to raise awareness of the need for true backups of SP Online data, but also to ask what experiences others have had, particularly with third-party solutions. I was impressed by a demo of AvePoint's latest backup offering, and am considering suggesting it to my clients. Has anyone out there used one of these products?
