Office 365 email backup

Microsoft 365 holds a 99.9 percent uptime record. It also employs geo-redundancy, where Exchange Online data is continuously replicated to multiple databases in geographically-dispersed Microsoft data centers to provide data restoration in case of large-scale infrastructure failures.

Microsoft 365 also provides a Recycle Bin with which users can restore deleted mailbox items without the need for the admin’s intervention. Even if the Recycle Bin is emptied, administrators can help users restore those items.

Even though Microsoft provides these measures, they're not a valid substitute for backups due to the following reasons:

• The Recycle Bin in Exchange Online is limited, as the deleted items are retained in the bin for a maximum of 30 days (120 days max for calendar entries). Once the retention period is up, the items will be permanently deleted and can’t be retrieved.
• A backup is a copy of a data you can use to restore historical data. Even though Microsoft has a copy of all your data in multiple locations, it cannot be used to restore particular items like a single email or contact back to your mailbox.

Only a backup and restoration solution can help you overcome all these disadvantages.

A potent Office 365 mailbox backup and restoration solution can protect you against the following issues:

• Accidental deletions: Accidental deletion of mailbox items can happen at any time, and by the time users notice that an item has been deleted, it may have been purged from the Recycle Bin. With a backup and recovery solution in place, you can restore the deleted item in an instant. Unlike the native Recycle Bin, there’s no limitation on the duration within which you have to perform the restoration.
• Intentional deletions: Insider threats are a major risk to any organization, and a rogue employee could easily delete any data on purpose. With a backup and recovery solution in place, you can restore the deleted item in an instant, even if the item has been purged from the Recycle Bin.
• Hardware malfunction: Microsoft servers are placed in geographically diverse locations, but it’s always a good practice to have a backup of your data yourself.

Ransomware: Ransomware for files is a widely known threat, but ransomware for email is something most organizations don’t protect against. Geo-redundancy or the Recycle Bin can’t help you get data back from a ransomware attack, but a backup and recovery solution can help you get back on your feet quickly without having to pay any ransom.

Keeping your company's data safe is your responsibility, which is why you should take measures to protect email data from loss, and also have a backup for when things go wrong.

Now that we’ve established that Office 365 data has to be backed up using a specialized backup solution, it’s time to look at what factors contribute to making a backup solution a good fit for your organization.

• Ability to comply with your RPOs and RTOs

  While all data is valuable, not all data is equally valuable. Some data is critical to the functioning of your organization, while other data might not be needed as often. You need to classify your data depending on its criticality, and determine how much data you can afford to lose in case of disasters. Recovery point objective (RPO) determines the amount of data that your organization can withstand losing as a result of a disaster without causing significant losses.

  Once you've classified the data based on its criticality, check if the backup solution provides automated backups as frequently as your RPOs require them to be.

  Recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of downtime your organization can withstand without impacting your revenue or credibility. An RTO of one hour implies that you need your disaster recovery solution to be able to get all your data back online within an hour of any disruption.

  Once you've identified your RTO, make sure the backup solution of your choice can restore all the necessary data within that time frame.

• Ability to comply with the 3-2-1 backup rule

  The 3-2-1 backup rule is a basic tenet of backing up data or an application. The 3-2-1 backup rule essentially means having at least three copies of data, of which two are stored in different mediums, and one is stored in an off-site environment.

  Generally, of the three copies of your data, one is your live environment, and the backup copies make up the remaining two. It's considered good practice to have your two backup copies on different types of storage mediums. Having your backups in different storage mediums such as solid-state drives, tape backups, removable storage devices, cloud backups, etc. provides the benefit of having a backup version ready even if one storage medium gets corrupted.

  You should also make sure you have at least one backup copy stored in an off-site location. If all your backup copies are stored in the same location, unavoidable circumstances like natural disasters or malicious attacks like ransomware, which affect all the data in your network, can result in you losing all data. With the widespread availability of cloud storage solutions like Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), storing data in the cloud is an optimal choice for an off-site backup location.

• Ability to make automatic, incremental backups, and perform granular restoration

  Disasters can happen at any time, and you should be prepared to restore your Office 365 mailboxes at any given instant. For this reason, any backup solution you choose must be able to make incremental backups at short intervals. Incremental backups make sure you only back up the changes made since the last backup cycle, so the time taken to complete the backup process is short.

  A good backup and restoration solution must also be able to granularly restore even a single item from your mailbox, instead of restoring an entire mailbox worth of data to get back a single item.

• Ability to store backups securely

  Using an insecure method to store your backups can lead to data theft and compliance violations. Make sure your backup solution provides a way to secure data during transmission and encrypt your backups.

ManageEngine RecoveryManager Plus is an Office 365 mailbox backup tool that satisfies all these criteria.

Back up all mailbox items: Back up emails, attachments, contacts, tasks, group mailboxes, archive mailboxes, and calendar entries.

Automated incremental backups: Back up only the changes made to mailboxes and sites since the last backup cycle.

Multiple backup storage: Store your Office 365 mailbox backups within your premises, or in Azure Blob Storage and Azure file shares.

Retention period: Define a retention period for your backups, and automatically discard older backups.

Item-level restoration: Restore individual mailbox items like a single email or contact from backups.

Mailbox-level restoration: Restore entire mailboxes from backups in a few simple clicks.

Multiple restoration modes: Restore mailbox items to the same mailbox, or to a different mailbox in the same tenant, to a mailbox in a different Exchange Online tenant, or even to a mailbox in an on-premises Exchange environment.

Advanced search filters: Use advanced search filters to locate a particular mailbox item across various backups.

Restoration preview: Preview content, attachments, and emails from backups before restoring them.

In addition to all these, you can also back up and restore data from other Office 365 services such as SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites, Active Directory, and on-premises Exchange environments using RecoveryManager Plus, making the product the only tool you need for your backup and restoration needs.