Office 365 Backups

[DavR]

We're considering making the move to Office 365 over the summer, and I'm costing up so we know what to budget for.....

 

Do you backup your Office 365 tenant, and if so, what software are you using? Onsite or cloud backup?

 

We use Veeam for our onsite backup, but at first glance their O365 product comes out at something like £2k a year :/

[supportman]

Do you backup your Office 365 tenant, and if so, what software are you using? Onsite or cloud backup?

 

Nope, no need really since its cloud based. They have their own restore solutions for free and most of our users also use local outlook which caches the emails anyway.

 

We've been cloud based for over 10 years now and never had any kind of backup solution for it.

[NetworkNinja]

We have a synology NAS which allows you to backup office 365. I plan to back all sites up once a month and so far it works great.

[smadison]

We have the https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/RS2418+ and the Active Backup for Office365 comes free, it is worth a look.

[djm968]

This might be useful - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/compliance/retention-policies

[DavR]

Nope, no need really since its cloud based. They have their own restore solutions for free and most of our users also use local outlook which caches the emails anyway.

 

We've been cloud based for over 10 years now and never had any kind of backup solution for it.

 

That's interesting to note. Do you as an admin have access to restore features, or do you have to log a support request?

 

What's the process you go through to restore a single file, for instance, that a user has screwed up? That's our most common restore scenario.

[DavR]

We have the https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/RS2418+ and the Active Backup for Office365 comes free, it is worth a look.

 

Ah man, Active Backup looks like just the thing!

 

Sadly, not looking at buying any storage products at the moment.

[Rob_D]

Nope, no need really since its cloud based. They have their own restore solutions for free and most of our users also use local outlook which caches the emails anyway.

We've been cloud based for over 10 years now and never had any kind of backup solution for it.

 

Microsoft 365 user agreement says they don't take responsibility for backing up your data and you should do your own backups.

 

6-b. We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement

[djm968]

- - - Updated - - -

 

That's interesting to note. Do you as an admin have access to restore features, or do you have to log a support request?

 

What's the process you go through to restore a single file, for instance, that a user has screwed up? That's our most common restore scenario.

 

Can all be done easily by the user themselves, users get complete control of the version history of each file and folders and you can restore your entire OneDrive folder to a previous date if you completely screw things up. Site admins can set data retention and version history policies as required. You also have a two stage recycle bin and Admins can set retention parameters for these.

Edited January 28, 2020 by djm968

[DavR]

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

Can all be done easily by the user themselves, users get complete control of the version history of each file and folders and you can restore your entire OneDrive folder to a previous date if you completely screw things up. Site admins can set data retention and version history policies as required. You also have a two stage recycle bin and Admins can set retention parameters for these.

 

Very helpful, thanks. I've had a bit of a play in our Office 365 environment, first and second stage recycle bins, version history, full OneDrive / Sharepoint area restore.... it's not bad for bundled with the product I suppose!

 

I'm still uneasy about trusting a cloud-based product with all of our data, AND backups. I wonder if I could script a weekly archive of data with PowerShell, as a compromise.

[Jamman960]

The only time I’ve needed a backup was when OneNote decided there wasn’t a default notebook so created a new one... straight over the original. OneNote files don’t have a version history within onedrive and instead allow you to use a recycle bin within the file which isn’t much help when it’s a new file.

 

Fortunately the client keeps occasional backups so we were able to recover most of it from the local pc... was slightly worried 3 years worth of notes had vanished :/

 

I’ll now recommend people should avoid using the default notebook

Edited January 28, 2020 by Jamman960

[DrCheese]

We're planning on doing the same (Moving files up to sharepoint/onedrive) over the next few months & this is a big thing for me as well - Email's I'm not fussed about but I'm wary about trusting MS as our only point of call for our files. They take responbility for hosting the data, but that doesn't abrogate our responbility for backup of our data.

 

I've had quotes for Veeam 365 (£3200 ish for three years) & Barracuda backup (£3500 per year, which is too much right now) but is anyone else out there already doing this?

[TwistedHelixis]

What you probably need is something like cubebackup but for office 365 - it only costs us about $2 per year per account under edu licensing, so is almost free and backs up all our G Suite data (email, drive, calendars.........) to local storage in school.

 

https://www.cubebackup.com

[DavR]

What you probably need is something like cubebackup but for office 365 - it only costs us about $2 per year per account under edu licensing, so is almost free and backs up all our G Suite data (email, drive, calendars.........) to local storage in school.

 

https://www.cubebackup.com

That's exactly the sort of price range we're after at least! I must admit we're not backing up our G Suite platform at the moment, but that's just juniors classwork.

[DavR]

We're planning on doing the same (Moving files up to sharepoint/onedrive) over the next few months & this is a big thing for me as well - Email's I'm not fussed about but I'm wary about trusting MS as our only point of call for our files. They take responbility for hosting the data, but that doesn't abrogate our responbility for backup of our data.

 

I've had quotes for Veeam 365 (£3200 ish for three years) & Barracuda backup (£3500 per year, which is too much right now) but is anyone else out there already doing this?

I couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer to this tbh, not one that we could afford.

 

I've shelved this for a few years until we do server replacements. In that context I can hopefully offset the costs of something like Veeam in the savings in other contracts.

[TwistedHelixis]

Found this list of different backup systems. Some cloud based, some old style. Randomly clicked on one halfway down that does 365 and G Suite to local storage and probably costs nothing, called BackupVault.

 

https://www.capterra.com/backup-software/

[mavhc]

Backup is a useless word, what are you trying to do? No need for the avoiding hw failures part of backup, they have that covered. So which of user error, versioning, or archive?

[DrCheese]

Not really a useless word...

 

It's protection against deletes (That don't always get noticed for months) or if an admin account gets compd and wipes out/locks out the tenant - Or MS have an extended outage, education is right at the bottom of the pile for restores as we pay very little.

[psydii]

Use OneDrive client to sync sites, and veeam endpoint backup to back them up?

 

However 90 days is usually enough time to notice and recover documents. Beyond that use retention policies to protect documents that must be kept for minimum length of time.

 

Also with versioning it is much easier to roll back and recover lost/damaged documents. We're got about 50% of our data up onto SharePoint/OneDrive and we've dropped from one or two restores a week to one or two a term. Initially there was lots of pointing people at the Sharepoint / OneDrive recycle bin or the version history feature, but as staff become more familiar it becomes totally self-serivce and we don't even know they are doing it!

[foofighterjim]

I could easily be wrong on this, but...

 

Isn't moving data to the cloud but then backing up locally just turning what many of us already do upside down? At the moment we have disk quotas keeping a lid on our on site storage, therefore reducing what we need to backup every evening. Part of the appeal of cloud storage is removing the need to set hard quotas and allow users to utilise the much more generous allocation of cloud storage. The cost saving point of moving to things like O365, Azure AD or G Suite is to reduce the need for local storage, if we were to backup everyone's OneDrive and Sharepoint sites (assuming everyone will eventually hit their quota limit), we would need a server(s) with over a PB of storage for a single archive point!

 

As pointed out by @psydii it becomes much more of a user awareness exercise than a technical problem to solve (at least locally anyway).

[Danp]

We're planning on doing the same (Moving files up to sharepoint/onedrive) over the next few months & this is a big thing for me as well - Email's I'm not fussed about but I'm wary about trusting MS as our only point of call for our files. They take responbility for hosting the data, but that doesn't abrogate our responbility for backup of our data.

 

I've had quotes for Veeam 365 (£3200 ish for three years) & Barracuda backup (£3500 per year, which is too much right now) but is anyone else out there already doing this?

 

Yes, we went live with Barracuda last week, it's still running out first backup

[TwistedHelixis]

Isn't moving data to the cloud but then backing up locally just turning what many of us already do upside down?

Not really. For one I don't need expensive servers onsite, just space. I also don't need backup servers to backup those server, which again is saving money. Our only expense will be storage which is dirt cheap.

[DrCheese]

Not really. For one I don't need expensive servers onsite, just space. I also don't need backup servers to backup those server, which again is saving money. Our only expense will be storage which is dirt cheap.

 

Yeah that's the thing - At the mo we have to buy on site disk storage that's highly available (i.e a SAN or hyper-converged) whereas you won't need something so powerful if it's just being used for backups. I bought a 30TB backup server last year for under £4k

[mavhc]

32TB of HDDs is only £600 now, plus another £100 for a computer to put the 4 drives in. No point having fast drives when you're writing a linear file at internet speeds.

 

Problem with the word backup is people use it to refer to at least 5 different goals.

 

Of course if your cloud service does fail, what do you do then, you have a copy of 32TBs of data, now what?

 

Does this also backup email, calendars, etc?

[ITGURU]

People think the cloud is the best place because it's all free! It may well be but the like of Microsoft offier resillience not backup, just because your data is replicated doesn't make it safe. So what if a mailbox gets hacked (we had this with a student who found all the sent emails in their sent items, and undeliverables in their inbox) and what if they infected your office 365 tenant..how do you explain that one to management if data was lost.