Office 365 Mailbox Backup

[newpersn]

Hello.

 

We are looking at Exchange online currently and the only thing that is putting us off/holding us back is backing up Offce 365 mailboxs.

 

We us Veeam for our backups but the cost to include the Office365 backups is insane... So we are looking around.

 

What do you guys do about Office 365 mailbox backups? (We currently have Exchange 2016 onprem)

[hallb15]

Have you looked at Altaro?

https://www.altaro.com/office-365-backup/

[EssentialRug]

Hello.

 

We are looking at Exchange online currently and the only thing that is putting us off/holding us back is backing up Offce 365 mailboxs.

 

We us Veeam for our backups but the cost to include the Office365 backups is insane... So we are looking around.

 

What do you guys do about Office 365 mailbox backups? (We currently have Exchange 2016 onprem)

 

Synology NAS using Active Backup for 365

[jthompson]

Not using 365 here but we use Datto Backupify to backup our staff Gmail mailboxes and Google Drive data. It can do 365, which is why I mention it. Per user per month pricing, so only feasible for us to do the staff mailboxes, really.

[Scifigirl]

+1 for synology

[psydii]

What is the case for needing a backup of the mailboxes? Would a retention policy suffice?

[jthompson]

If a user or malicious actor trashes a mailbox, a backup gives you a way to restore it easily. Without a backup, you're not going to be able to restore it for them, really.

[lmgtfy]

+1 for synology

Yes synology is great everything you need. I can't think of a cheaper solution.

[Squelch]

Another +1 for synology.

[DrCheese]

We have Barrcuda for backing up all our 365 data. Does the job pretty well and didn't break the bank.

[MYK-IT]

Same as @DrCheese after comparing numerous Office 365 backup options (e.g. cloud to local, cloud to cloud) including Redstor (that we currently use to backup onsite data) we went with Barracuda Cloud to Cloud backup for Office 365. Charged based on staff count only, (e.g. unlimited students, data capacity and retention) and protects Exchange, OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint.

 

Eliminated need to procure and maintain onsite servers, or to keep expanding storage to accommodate increased data usage within Office 365. All without being selective so we can select and backup all user accounts etc

 

Must admit the GUI could do with improvement (for example, compared to Redstor Office 365 backup) but it is being improved frequently, and good value for money.

Edited January 31, 2022 by MYK-IT

[Soulfish]

At an enterprise level I haven't met a large-scale customer (50k+ seats) that backs up O365. We utilise retention policies and legal holds where required and it satisfies both our internal "backup" requirements and all of our legal + compliance requirements. What's the requirement driving offsite backup of O365?

[KSGNETMAN]

+1 for Barracuda, it's cheap (compared to others) and students are included FOC. It also backs up SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive as well as Mail.

[colly72]

QNAP do a similar solution as Synology, called Boxafe (https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/software/boxafe) No license fees, so as long as the Qnap NAS drive supports it, it's another very cost effective solution.

[psydii]

At an enterprise level I haven't met a large-scale customer (50k+ seats) that backs up O365. We utilise retention policies and legal holds where required and it satisfies both our internal "backup" requirements and all of our legal + compliance requirements. What's the requirement driving offsite backup of O365?

 

JThompson's response got me looking into this. Folder structure contains information and represents many days/weeks/years of work. It is not preserved by the holds/retention and cannot be recovered if deleted.

 

A *possible* mitigation would be archive mailboxes, but those are also vulnerable to accidental/malicious deletion of items/folders (but there is a good chance you'd have the structure preserved in either the main mailbox or the archive mailbox, which could then be recreated by hand)

 

Got to say (and tempting fate), in 20 years of managing exchange "recover my folder structure" hasn't ever come up, only ever recover a deleted mailbox, or a deleted mail, but I can see how it could be devastating.

[MYK-IT]

At an enterprise level I haven't met a large-scale customer (50k+ seats) that backs up O365. We utilise retention policies and legal holds where required and it satisfies both our internal "backup" requirements and all of our legal + compliance requirements. What's the requirement driving offsite backup of O365?

 

Microsoft Shared Responsibility Model

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/shared-responsibility

https://www.msp360.com/resources/blog/understanding-microsoft-365-shared-responsibility-model/

 

[psydii]

Counter-point for 365 specifically: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-customer-and-cloud-partner-ebcm-responsibilities

 

In the context of the Azure responsibilities matrix, *Microsoft 365* is the customer.

 

We are the customers of Microsoft 365.

 

 

Of course you can shoot yourself in the foot, and getting Retention Policies etc correct may be more effort than just paying for cloud backup for smaller organisations that don't have dedicated roles/teams within their IT Service for this sort of thing. (VEEAM is way easier than getting my head around retention tags/policy and the changes that have come through over the last five years)

Edited February 1, 2022 by psydii

[jthompson]

JThompson's response got me looking into this. Folder structure contains information and represents many days/weeks/years of work. It is not preserved by the holds/retention and cannot be recovered if deleted.

 

A *possible* mitigation would be archive mailboxes, but those are also vulnerable to accidental/malicious deletion of items/folders (but there is a good chance you'd have the structure preserved in either the main mailbox or the archive mailbox, which could then be recreated by hand)

 

Got to say (and tempting fate), in 20 years of managing exchange "recover my folder structure" hasn't ever come up, only ever recover a deleted mailbox, or a deleted mail, but I can see how it could be devastating.

 

Recovering a mailbox (or indeed any individual email items) isn't something that I've ever been asked to do either, not since we migrated to Google a few years ago. That could be as much down to users not knowing that it's a thing they can ask for as to anything else. If a user connects their account to Office Outlook or something and presses the all of the wrong buttons, it's nice to know that it could be unshambles'd easily.

 

We started with cloud-cloud backups prinicpally as a way to protect Google Drive and Shared Drives data from ransomware attacks, since staff love using the desktop sync client. Recovering data from a ransomware attack is not going to be Google's responsibility, it'd be ours. The mailboxes being protected as well is just a helpful bonus, really.

 

If we were using O365 for anything meaty, I'd be wanting c2c backups in place.

[psydii]

Recovery from ransomware is a feature of 365 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-a-shared-library-317791c3-8bd0-4dfd-8254-3ca90883d39a?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

[newpersn]

Question for the Synology users.

 

What's the limits in terms of users and what is the cost of doing this?

 

Thanks in advance. [emoji846]

[lmgtfy]

Question for the Synology users.

 

What's the limits in terms of users and what is the cost of doing this?

 

Thanks in advance. [emoji846]

No limits in terms of users, you can have multiple tenants if you want. Basic cost of a NAS and drives really, just check here for compatible models https://www.synology.com/en-uk/dsm/packages/ActiveBackup-Office365

[Soulfish]

It's the classic risk vs cost. From our (a large enterprise) perspective we're unable to backup our content; there's too much of it already and our growth rates are insane. However, we've accepted that Microsoft's existing capabilities and the backup that is provided as part of our contract are both suitable and meet our RPO and RTO. And unlike a lot of customers we've seen this in practice: we've had entire segments of our Exchange Online infrastructure go offline and seamlessly failover to another datacenter, we've restored data from OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint (in the many PBs range in a single go previously) and our blanket legal-hold/retention policy ensures that even if an email is accidentally deleted it's recoverable for many years (until our hard deletion policies purge it at least!).

 

At the SME side, I've supported (and continue to support) a handful of family/friends that have tenants with at most a handful of users and we still don't back those up. I could be convinced that there may be a usecase for a very small number of very important VIP users where you want multiple layers of protection for their data, but for the general case for 99.99999% of users I'm happy to rely on the service and the built in tools.

[EssentialRug]

Question for the Synology users.

 

What's the limits in terms of users and what is the cost of doing this?

 

Thanks in advance. [emoji846]

 

No limits...you can backup as much as the storage you buy.. The software is bundled free with the Synology, Active Backup for Microsoft 365.