Microsoft 356 Backup

Safeguard your Microsoft 365 Data with incremental Backup and quick recovery. Eliminate the impact of ransomware, malicious actors, human error, and other disasters to your Microsoft productivity apps.
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What is Microsoft 365 Backup?

Microsoft 365 Backup GIF

Microsoft 365 Backup works as ONE part of a complete Business continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan for your End User Data stored in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365 Backup’s specific purpose in an overall strategy is to provide quick backup and quick recovery from accidental/malicious employee content overwrite/deletion and helps prevent from Ransomware attacks that typically encrypt backups with malicious overwrites.

Why Microsoft 365 Backup?

  • Comprehensive Data Protection: Microsoft 365 offers robust security features but, doesn’t include a native backup solution to protect against Ransomware and Microsoft 365 Backup ensures that your data is securely backed up and easily recoverable with multiple recovery points.
  • Simplified Management: Reduce IT labor and expertise with seamlessly integrated, user-friendly interface.
  • Cost and Time Savings: Automating backup services streamline your data protection process for substantial time and cost savings over self-managed backups.
  • Risk Mitigation: Cybercrime evolves rapidly, so this additional layer of defense ensures that your productivity data can be restored quickly in the event of an incident.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Standardized backup service processes and reports help maintain your company’s compliance requirements.
  • Flexible and Scalable: Incremental billing fits your data protection needs from initial investment to your future growth potential.
Microsoft 365 Backup Set up

What can I back up?

OneDrive

OneDrive

Sharepoint

Sharepoint

MS Exchange

Exchange

Sharepoint

Teams

(to come)

Doesn’t Microsoft Already Backup M365?

While Microsoft provides some built-in data protection capabilities and may be able to restore a full tenant, recovery times can take between 30-90 days. Business Continuity conscious enterprises use Microsoft 365 Backup for the following reasons:

Ransomware

Microsoft 365 may never go down, but in a cyberattack, data can be made inaccessible unless you have a recent backup you can failover to. Protect your company data and your customer’s personal data with effective backups.

Human Error

In business, important files are deleted, lost, overwritten, and stolen all the time. Having recoverable backups of your critical data ensures access to the important items as you need them.

Compliance

Certain industries (like healthcare and finance) require higher backup and recovery standards. Companies may need to hold data for longer periods of time, minimize downtime exposure, or protect confidential user data.

Pricing

Storage on Microsoft 365 Backup:

$0.15 /GB/Month billed to an Azure subscriptions.

Frequently Asked Questions?

Data Protection and Backup

What components of Office 365 do you backup?

Each Exchange Mailbox, SharePoint Sites, and OneDrive is considered a “Protection Unit”

All Teams data is stored in one of the above Protection Units

How often are backups performed?

Every 10 minutes for Mailbox,

Every 15 minutes SharePoint/OneDrive

Can backup schedules be customized according to our needs?

No – it’s “continuous protection” for Microsoft 365 data.

What is the retention period for backed-up data?

Mailbox: 1 year

SharePoint/OneDrive: Each backup is initially kept for 14 days. After 14 days, one backup will be kept per week and retained for 1 year.

How can you secure our company backup data from cyber-attacks does any specific restoration process if any incident occurred?

Microsoft 365 Backup specifically prevents from overwriting versions in traditional backups.  It does this by appending new backups rather than overwriting.  Especially useful to recover from large scale Ransomware attacks in hours.

Is this data Incremental or Differential Backups?

It uses “Append-Only” storage of Full environment backups. This means that SharePoint can only add new content blobs and can never change old ones until they’re permanently deleted. The Exchange items are backed up in an immutable manner and can’t be accessed by a client process (such as Outlook, OWA, or MFCMAPI). This process ensures that items can’t be changed or corrupted after an initial save, protecting against attackers that try to corrupt old versions.

Data Restore and Recovery

What are the options for restoring data (e.g., granular item recovery, full restoration)?

Currently, you can restore OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites, and Exchange mailbox content from specific prior points in time from the backups. Site restores to a prior point in time, if restored to the same URL, will overwrite the state and the content of the site to match the exact state at the prior point in time. This is commonly referred to as a rollback versus a roll-forward.

Mailbox restores inherently restore only changed items such that current items that remain unchanged since the desired prior restore point won’t be modified or overwritten. Thus, mailbox restores follow a roll-forward process.

Site, OneDrive, and mailbox restores can be done in place or in the case of SharePoint sites to a new URL, or in the case of mailbox items a new folder. By restoring to a new location, any undesirable overwriting any existing data is avoided.

Note: During the preview, only full OneDrive account and SharePoint site restore is possible. In the future, file-level granular restore will be possible.

In the future, we’ll support granular OneDrive and SharePoint file-level restore to provide a roll-forward behavior similar to that of mailbox item restores today.

How long does it typically take to restore data?
Type RPO for 0-14 days in the past RPO for 15-365 days in the past

Full OneDrive account and full SharePoint site restore

15 minutes

One week

Exchange Online

10 minutes

10 minutes

Can you perform point-in-time recoveries?

Currently, you can restore OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites, and Exchange mailbox content from specific prior points in time from the backups. Site restores to a prior point in time, if restored to the same URL, will overwrite the state and the content of the site to match the exact state at the prior point in time. This is commonly referred to as a rollback versus a roll-forward.

Mailbox restores inherently restore only changed items such that current items that remain unchanged since the desired prior restore point won’t be modified or overwritten. Thus, mailbox restores follow a roll-forward process. Site, OneDrive, and mailbox restores can be done in place or in the case of SharePoint sites to a new URL, or in the case of mailbox items a new folder. By restoring to a new location, any undesirable overwriting any existing data is avoided.

Note: During the preview, only full OneDrive account and SharePoint site restore is possible. In the future, file-level granular restore will be possible.

In the future, we’ll support granular OneDrive and SharePoint file-level restore to provide a roll-forward behavior similar to that of mailbox item restores today.

Is there a limit on the size or number of items you can restore?
Can users perform self-service recoveries, or is it managed centrally?

Managed centrally by admin

Is there any Cost Involved for Restore data as per Size of data?

No, you only pay for the storage used per GB ($0.15/GB/month) regardless of number of mailboxes, sites, or OneDrives protected.  No cost per backup.  No cost per restore.   The usage gets charged to an attached Azure subscription

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How to get started with Backup and Recovery

1. Discovery: Your backup and recovery journey begins with a discovery call to better understand the tools, technologies, and data your business needs to preserve

2. Assessment: Once the scope and scale of your business is understood, our technical resources will assess your environment(s) to create your Backup and Recovery roadmap

3. Setup and Testing: our team ensures that your business can complete backups successfully and restore your data from backups to an operational level

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