Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
By the way, the advent of Microsoft Teams has increased the complexity of the challenge of backup for Office 365. The items created in teams now have to be backed up and then reassembled if required. Teams joins Groups, Planner, Office 365 Video, et al. as examples of applications that exist inside Office 365 that don't on-premises, meaning that on-premises backup tools that attempt to expand into the cloud struggle to cope with the full breadth of Office 365.
The net is that current backup products are capable of copying basic data (Exchange, SharePoint) but struggle with the newer parts of Office 365. This might be sufficient for your needs, but I suspect that things will become more complex over time as Microsoft develops more applications to leverage the unique capabilities of Office 365.
Backup vendors - if you have a product that can truly backup the entire data for an enterprise tenant from Exchange to SharePoint to Yammer and the applications cited above to Sway - and is capable of restoring all the data in such a way that the applications work (or at least, sense can be made of the restored data), then I am happy to learn and write about the product. I have been looking for years... and although I see offerings, I don't see point solutions rather an a service-wide answer. Maybe I have been looking in the wrong place?
This actually came up as a topic when we were purchasing DocAve. They mentioned that it's something they're working on (the ability to back up content in Groups), but does not exist yet. None of the vendors can back up the entirety of O365 at this point, because Microsoft does not make it accessible to third parties.
"Microsoft does not make it accessible..."
Or is it that the backup vendors have not done the work to figure out what they need and how this data might be retrieved?
After all, the Microsoft Graph API is a pretty good way to get at most data inside Office 365. There are gaps, but those gaps will only be filled if people complain.
But leaving the Graph aside, I suspect that a more pressing issue is how to scale up to backup the data for very large tenants in a reasonable period. APIs like the Graph are good at doing things like "Tell me my appointments for today" or "Show me the documents that I have shared with x", but they are not designed to stream gigabytes of data from Office 365 to a cloud backup vendor's datacenter.
