How to back up Microsoft Teams data using RecoveryManager Plus
In this article:
Objective
This guide explains how to back up Microsoft Teams data using RecoveryManager Plus, a comprehensive enterprise backup and recovery solution. It enables administrators to schedule backups, select specific Teams sites and channels for granular backups, automate site selection, and configure retention policies, ensuring data security and compliance with regulations.
Why back up Microsoft Teams data?
Backing up Microsoft Teams data is crucial for several reasons:
- It safeguards organizations against data loss caused by accidental deletion, malicious attacks, or system failures.
- Regular backups with data retention policies help maintain compliance.
- Backups allow organizations to retain and access site data as needed, ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
Using a Microsoft Teams backup solution like RecoveryManager Plus simplifies this process by enabling automated backups of Teams data at regular intervals and downloading or exporting the data easily.
Prerequisites
- The account used to configure a tenant in RecoveryManager Plus must be assigned the SharePoint Administrator role.
Steps to follow
The following steps illustrate how you can back up Microsoft Teams data using RecoveryManager Plus.
- Log in to RecoveryManager Plus as an administrator.
- Navigate to the SharePoint & OneDrive tab > Backup Settings.
- Click the Create Backup button located in the top-right corner of the screen.
- In the Tenant Details section, select the Tenant that contains the Microsoft Team site(s) you wish to back up.
- In the Backup Details section, provide a name for the backup schedule.
- In the Select Sites field, choose the sites you want to back up by clicking the Add icon
or import them from a CSV file by clicking the Import CSV icon 
.
- In the pop-up that appears, RecoveryManager Plus provides two views to see the list of sites in your Microsoft 365 tenant:
- Tree View is the default view that displays a hierarchical view of your sites and subsites. Select the sites you want to back up by selecting the check box beside the site name. To exclude child sites from being backed up, check the Don't inherit child sites check box. You can also search for a particular Microsoft Team site by its URL or name in the search bar at the top.
- List View displays all sites and subsites in alphabetical order. Use the search icon
to find specific sites for backup. You can select all the sites by selecting the check box beside the Title text.
- Click the Filter by Criteria option available at the top right corner of the Select Sites pop-up to filter sites based on certain conditions.
- You can filter based on attributes like Site Title, Site URL, Site Type, Parent Site, or Sites. You can also apply conditions such as Starts with, Ends with, Contains, or Does not contain for the selected attribute. Add more conditions using the Add icon .
- You can also decide the type of the condition (AND/OR) when you have multiple conditions. You can remove the conditions set using the Close icon
.
- Once you've selected all the sites you want to back up, click OK.
- If you wish to back up Microsoft Teams channels, enable the Teams Channel Backup toggle.
- If you wish to automate the backup schedule based on certain conditions, enable the Automate Site Selection toggle bar.
- Set the conditions based on the options (Site Title, Site URL, Site Type, Parent Site, or Sites) in the Automation Settings popup. A schedule will run every day to discover the created, modified, and deleted sites, and these sites will be validated against the condition set. If any of these sites satisfies the conditions, it will automatically be added to the selected backup job.
- Select the Validate existing sites selection with automation criteria check box to periodically validate the existing sites in this backup schedule against the criteria, add sites that satisfy the criteria, and remove sites that don't satisfy the criteria.
- In the Scheduler & Repository section, select the desired frequency at which the schedule must run from the options available in the Backup Frequency drop-down:
- Daily: The scheduler will run once every day at the scheduled time.
- Weekly: The scheduler will run once every week on the specified day and time.
- Monthly: The scheduler will run once a month on the specified date and time.
- Select the repository in which you wish to store the backups from the Select Repository drop-down.
- In the Item-level Retention field, enter the number of days/months/years for which your Microsoft Teams backups should be stored. Backups older than the specified age will be discarded. To learn more about how RecoveryManager Plus processes item-level retention, click here.
You can also configure RecoveryManager Plus to store your backups forever, in which case backups will not be discarded.
Note: The minimum item-level retention for Microsoft Teams backups is 30 days.
- If you wish to encrypt your backup data, check the Encrypt backup data check box and provide the Encryption Key.
- Click Save to save the scheduler, and the backup will run at the specified time.
- Click Save & Run to save the scheduler and trigger the first backup process immediately.
- Click Cancel to exit the configuration screen.
Figure 1: Microsoft Teams Backup Settings page in RecoveryManager Plus.
Choose the Microsoft Teams sites to include in the backup schedule.
Enable the Teams Channels Backup toggle to back up channels in the selected sites.
By following these steps, you can securely back up Microsoft Teams data with RecoveryManager Plus.
Troubleshooting tips
Issue: A Microsoft Teams site has been backed up, including all attachments from the channels within the site. While the metadata of the attachments is visible in RecoveryManager Plus's interface, attempts to download the attachments has failed with the following error message.
Error: The attachment could not be downloaded due to retention policy settings or may have been deleted before being backed up.
Possible causes:
- Attachment was unavailable during backup: The backup might have failed to include the attachment because it was not accessible at the time of backup.
- The file may have been removed due to the retention policies set for the backup schedule: RecoveryManager Plus allows you to enforce retention policies that determine how long backup data is stored before it is automatically purged. If an attachment was successfully backed up but the retention period has lapsed, the backup of the file will be deleted while the metadata might still be visible in the interface. To prevent this from happening in the future, consider increasing the retention period for backups, ensuring that attachments remain available for a longer duration.
- The attachment might not be present in the site that has been backed up: If an attachment was deleted in Microsoft Teams site or SharePoint Online site before the scheduled backup, RecoveryManager Plus may not have been able to back it up. In such cases, while the metadata may have been backed up, the actual attachment will be missing from the backup. To prevent this in future backups, it's recommended to verify the availability of attachments during the backup window.
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Last updated on: 24-04-2025
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