Backing up exchange online

[kevin_lane]

Just wondered how other schools are doing this

 

We are about to look at some backup costing for exchange online now.

 

I’m thinking maybe not licensing pupils but only license for staff

 

Would this be a fair point?

 

We have never ever need to recover emails for a pupils

 

And the for the first time in 15+ years I had to restore sent items to our deputy head which had over 2000 emails - thanks to veeam worked beautifully

 

Would be interested to see what other schools do

[DalekSec]

Our 365 environment is backed up via Barracuda

[ozydave]

Another vote for barracuda.

License the staff and students are included free

[smarties11]

Definitely Barracuda - started using this ourselves recently. You only license your FTEs like with EES/OVS and students are free. Unlimited storage and retention. From memory I think we paid around £1400pa for 80 FTEs. Couldn't find anything else that came close on price. We've used it a couple of times already for restores and exports and it works well.

 

On top of this we also backup using Synology Active Backup, which comes free with any Synology NAS. This gives us two backups, one on site and one cloud, and helps me sleep at night! 😂

 

Both solutions recommended.

[Edu-IT]

Barracuda here too.

[DrCheese]

Barracuda here as well - It's cost just can't be beaten.

 

I use and love Veeam products for internal resources, but they've got really arrogant as a result of their product being so good and price the 365 backup solution well above anything remotely affordable for a school.

[smarties11]

Barracuda here as well - It's cost just can't be beaten.

 

I use and love Veeam products for internal resources, but they've got really arrogant as a result of their product being so good and price the 365 backup solution well above anything remotely affordable for a school.

 

Exactly the same with Altaro; their on prem product is awesome and I recommend it to anyone looking for a new solution; but their cloud backup solution is wayyyy too expensive - purely down to their licensing model requiring students to be licensed also.

[ITGURU]

Using on-site Synology with backup for 365 all free apart from obvious cost of hardware/drives.

[Edu-IT]

Using on-site Synology with backup for 365 all free apart from obvious cost of hardware/drives.

What is your strategy if you lose access to the Synology, perhaps through a physical disaster such as Fire/Flood? Is it mirrored somewhere else?

[ITGURU]

What is your strategy if you lose access to the Synology, perhaps through a physical disaster such as Fire/Flood? Is it mirrored somewhere else?

No, but unless 365 lost all our data at the same time as the above happening, then its not an issue. Synology would be used to recover compromised mailboxes/lost mail, if synology lost then just resync the data.

[EssentialRug]

+1 for Synology

[smarties11]

No, but unless 365 lost all our data at the same time as the above happening, then its not an issue. Synology would be used to recover compromised mailboxes/lost mail, if synology lost then just resync the data.

 

Don't forget to consider compliance when weighing this decision up - e.g. if a complaint was made against a staff member and you needed to look at their mailbox as it stood 6 months ago - you might not be able to do this if you've recently resync'd the Synology due to failure / other issue - potentially then being unable to prove/disprove the complaint and leaving your staff member vulnerable.

 

IMHO it's always best to have more than one form of backup, and that's no different when cloud is the data source. It's a School decision to weigh up at the end of the day, there's a gazillion School's out there not backing up their 365/GSuite estate at all, relying purely on Microsoft's resilience!

[k-strider]

Don't forget to consider compliance when weighing this decision up - e.g. if a complaint was made against a staff member and you needed to look at their mailbox as it stood 6 months ago - you might not be able to do this if you've recently resync'd the Synology due to failure / other issue - potentially then being unable to prove/disprove the complaint and leaving your staff member vulnerable.

 

IMHO it's always best to have more than one form of backup, and that's no different when cloud is the data source. It's a School decision to weigh up at the end of the day, there's a gazillion School's out there not backing up their 365/GSuite estate at all, relying purely on Microsoft's resilience!

 

Whilst we are using Google Workspace backup on Synology I was wondering about something similar, but also to try and comply with the 3-2-1 backup so would look to using 2 synology NAS to take a snapshot backup of one Google workspace to the other. which you can also do with 0365 backup. bringing it on and offline to do the snapshot.

 

The problem is just shear volume of Data ours is now 5TB on deduped volume 11GB of data in total trying to use hyper backup on synology to take it offline takes over 2 weeks to archive im hoping the snapshot NAS to NAS will be faster as it will be diferential.

[smarties11]

Whilst we are using Google Workspace backup on Synology I was wondering about something similar, but also to try and comply with the 3-2-1 backup so would look to using 2 synology NAS to take a snapshot backup of one Google workspace to the other. which you can also do with 0365 backup. bringing it on and offline to do the snapshot.

 

The problem is just shear volume of Data ours is now 5TB on deduped volume 11GB of data in total trying to use hyper backup on synology to take it offline takes over 2 weeks to archive im hoping the snapshot NAS to NAS will be faster as it will be diferential.

 

I think Synology supports sync to S3, so you could use some cheap cloud storage like Wasabi to keep your Google shared folder on your Synology in sync. Personally I prefer two separate solutions though, completely independent of each other which gives more flexibility in the event of issues with one or the other. Barracuda is very cheap and worth the investment IMO. I think Datto do something similar for Workspace, but no idea on costings. The great thing about Barracuda is that it is unlimited storage and retention, and you only license your FTEs, students are free.