Office 365 and backing up of mailboxes

[bushby]

Morning all,

 

we are looking at moving our exchange server to office 365 this is just for the staff mailboxes

 

is there backup available? how far back does it go?

 

would it be better to have a hybrid system so that a DAG setup for the backing up?

 

are there solutions available for just backing up 365?

Edited February 8, 2015 by elsiegee40

[elsiegee40]

The whole point of the cloud solutions is that they back it up. You don't need to repeat the exercise. Unless you are asking about retrieving emails that have been deleted that shouldn't have been... I am no expert on O365, but in gmail deleted emails sit in a deleted items folder and don't get explicitly deleted for a couple of weeks. I imagine O365 is similar

[Marshall_IT]

You can set up retention policies for deleted mail and also put a mailbox on litigation hold of needed.

 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/exchange-online-message-policy-recovery-and-compliance.aspx

 

I think that's the correct article.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Marshall_IT

[MrFrostmaul]

We are also interested with backing up as well so we have our own local copies of emails in case anything happens.

[Roberto]

I can only suggest reading this. If you want a local backup (in the traditional sense) of the exchange server hosting your emails in O365 then cloud email might not be for you.

 

There are options out there. A couple that spring to mind are using journaling to "backup" messages, tools that connect to the mailbox as if they were clients and back up the mailbox contents that way, tools like cloudfinder can all be made to work to some extent... however, you're engaging a service, not renting a server and this obviously limits what you can do somewhat. If you have business requirements that cannot be met without having your own "proper" backups then I would say Office 365 (and any other cloud solution) are not for you.

[Stuclark]

Bear in mind that the standard Office 365 retention period for deleted emails etc. is only 90 days!

 

Yes, it's possible to turn on the litigation hold options, which theoretically keep data for ever, but when we asked MS directly whether this could be turned on by default, and for an entire Exvhange organisation, they simply didn't know.

 

... for this reason alone, we've decided to keep all our email in-house.

[edutech4schools]

You can do backups in GAFE using one of the many third part backup apps. I tried one that backed up everything docs, emails, calendar, google sites etc and keeps live copies on your data storage device. Would be very surprised if Office 365 does not have similar

[edutech4schools]

GAFF users can do a manual backup of all their stuff which downloads to the local pc. I use this for myself but also get the staff to do this a few times each year at a small primary.

[Stuclark]

Office 365 doesn't have the same 3rd party backup solutions as Google Apps / Drive do. AFAIK no one is doing a sensible solution for backing up things like Exchange Online DBs, as MS won't give direct access to them for one thing.

 

Also, having an on-site backup of a cloud offering is sort of missing the point ... you'd still have to invest in lots of local storage to host your backups. And if you're intending to use a cloud backup solution to backup a cloud solution - do you know where that backup data is being stored?

[themightymrp]

You can currently enable an online Archive feature for the mailboxes and set a retention policy to shift emails into the users archive after so long (we have ours set to 12 months). There is a more advanced archiving and recovery feature available but there's a charge for it:

 

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving ? archiving email

 

According to the Office 365 roadmap, they are working on adding support for directly uploading your onsite .PST files into your O365 archive (removing the need for doing it through full Office Outlook). Plus, they are going to be changing the default delete email retention policy so that the user has the ability to delete items when they choose, rather than them being removed from the Deleted Items folder automatically:

 

 

You see people! I have finally started to look at the road map for information

[Roberto]

GAFF users can do a manual backup of all their stuff which downloads to the local pc. I use this for myself but also get the staff to do this a few times each year at a small primary.

 

You can do similar with Exchange Online too, but I wouldn't really class this as a reliable backup in the case of either provider. You couldn't count on a user having done this in a DR scenario and you could hardly use this backup as a reliable basis for investigating the user's email usage, for example. Journalling might be adequate and is a supported scenario for Exchange Online, but still wouldn't give me the warm and fuzzy "backed up" feeling.