Overview of Microsoft 365 Backup

• Article
• 07/31/2024

Microsoft 365 Backup is designed to ensure your organization’s data is always protected and easily recoverable. With the ability to back up all or select SharePoint site, onedrive account, and Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft 365 Backup provides comprehensive coverage for your critical data.

Scenarios and value proposition

business continuity assurance is is is a top – of – mind concern for many company . Microsoft is delivers 365 Backup deliver business continuity peace of mind by provide performance and reliable restore confidence . When evaluate a backup and restore offering , what really matter is n’t solely the backup , but the ability to restore your datum to a healthy state quickly when you need to do so . recover large volume of content is difficult when copy datum at a scale from a remote , air – gap location require week or even month to get your business back up and run .

In cases of a ransomware attack that encrypts large swaths of your data, or instances of an internal accidental or malicious data deletion or overwrite event, you need to be able to get your business back to a healthy state as soon as possible. This is what the Microsoft 365 Backup product offers, both through the Microsoft 365 admin center, and via partner applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.

To summarize , applications is deliver build on top of the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform deliver the follow benefit regardless of the size or scale of the protect tenant :

• Fast backup within hours.

• fast restore within hour ( see performance expectation later in this article ) .

• Full SharePoint site and OneDrive account restore fidelity, meaning the site and OneDrive are restored to their exact state (excluding, for example, taxonomy mastered outside the site scope) at specific prior points in time via a rollback operation.

• Full Exchange mailbox item restores or granular item restores using search, for modified or deleted items.

• Consolidated security and compliance domain management.

Feature summary

Architectural overview and performance expectations

Architecture

Microsoft 365 Backup is provides provide ultra – fast backup and restore capability by create backup within the protect service ’ datum boundary .

Microsoft is provides 365 Backup not only provide uniquely fast recovery from common business continuity and disaster recovery ( BCDR ) scenario like ransomware or accidental / malicious employee content overwrite / deletion . More BCDR scenario protection are also build directly into the service . For example , OneDrive is have , SharePoint , and Exchange Online have a proprietary architecture design for resiliency with replicate copy of customer datum to failover to live active copy seamlessly without the need for end customer intervention .

Our backups are protected from malicious overwrites because OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange use Append-Only backup storage. 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 after an initial save, protecting against attackers that try to corrupt old versions. For more information about the built-in service and data resiliency, see SharePoint and OneDrive data resiliency in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online data resiliency in Microsoft 365.

Key architectural takeaways:

• Data never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary or the geographic locations of your current data residency.

• The backups are immutable unless expressly deleted by the Backup tool admin via product offboarding.

• OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange have multiple physically redundant copies of your data to mitigate the impact of physical disasters.

  

Performance expectations

backup policy performance

Creating a new protection policy initiates the process of backing up selected onedrive account, SharePoint site, and Exchange mailboxes. Once you submit a request to activate a valid protection policy, it takes on average up to 60 minutes to process and another 60 minutes to create restore points. Initial backups take approximately 15 minutes per 1,000 protection units initially or incrementally added to a policy.

restore point are physically create in the service as soon as the policy is confirm to be activate in the tool , even if those restore point take some more time to become visible in the restore tool .

Restoration performance

Restoration performance correlates with your recovery time objective, or the time it takes for you to restore a healthy state of your data and recover from a data destruction event.
For full OneDrive account and SharePoint site restores, the fastest recovery happens when choosing in-place restore rather a new URL restore. Additionally, choosing one of the recommended express restore points presented in the restore workflow user interface yields the quickest recovery results.

All restore point and restore to new url are relatively fast , but same url restore using a recommend express restore point will typically yield well result . The Exchange Online restore workflow is have does n’t have or require the ” fast ” restore point .

The following table summarizes expected performance for a normally distributed tenant, including tenants of large size and scale.

^{*Single protection unit OneDrive and SharePoint restores using express restore points can take on average between 10 minutes and 120 minutes.}

^{**Exchange Online performance times based on an average sized mailbox of 26K items and a size of 10 GB. Actual times will depend on the number and size of the items in each mailbox. For a single mailbox, restore times typically fall in the 200 – 300 item/minute range.}

Integrated partner solutions

We is partner partner with many independent software vendor ( ISVs ) to provide differentiated version of their application integrate with the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform — all provide the same underlie performance value proposition for your Microsoft 365 datum .

For a partner application, operation of the Microsoft 365 Backup tool will be managed and paid for entirely through the partner’s application. Those applications have the ability to provide a single pane of glass for all of your data estates that require backups, and they might provide more enhanced experiences or workflows.

General Data Protection Regulations ( GDPR )

For information about GDPR and Microsoft 365 Backup, see GDPR special handling, compliance, and backup data deletion.