Cloud-Based Mail Backup and Recovery with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365

To help you always remain in control of your data, we developed a solution that allows you to mitigate the risk of losing access to your Exchange Online email data and ensure availability to your users. Meet the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Protecting Office 365 Exchange Online's data integrity through built-in mechanisms

Let’s look at how organizations’ mail is protected in the cloud. Of course, an administrator monitors the Exchange-side policies, especially the retention policy for remote sites. If the retention period for mail in the Deleted Items store has not expired, mail may be retrieved and recovered from it. By default, the retention period is 30 days; you can change this value in the Exchange Admin Center.
 

For more information on MRM (messaging records management) policy options, read this Microsoft TechNet article.

To protect your mail data in the cloud, Microsoft Exchange Data Availability Groups (DAG) are also used, as well as the traditional backup tools aimed at helping you in disaster recovery.

However, failures may occur on the user side, too, and you definitely need a solution to protect organizations’ mail against data loss scenarios not covered by traditional tools. This is exactly the situation where the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 can help. This solution backs up mailbox data of an Office 365 organization to a local repository, allowing you to meet the “3-2-1” rule for data protection. It also offers flexible recovery options, providing for quick search and restore of individual mailbox items residing in either archived Office 365 content or on-premises Exchange backups.

How Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 works

As you see in the picture below, the work flow is rather simple: 



1.  Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 gathers mailbox data from Exchange Online using Exchange Web Services and PowerShell, and stores it in the repository; data is transferred using SSL. To carry out these operations automatically, an administrator creates and schedules a backup job. Each successful job run creates a restore point where the corresponding state of the mailbox data store is kept.

2, 3.  A user selects the mailbox database state to work with (as of the latest restore point, or as of the certain point in time), and this data store is automatically added to the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange scope. This way, it becomes available for browsing and restore of mailbox items and folders. 

4. Then users can utilize browsing, searching and restore capabilities of Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange. They include:

In this post you’ll find information about Installation and Configuration. To learn more about Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Office 365, visit the product preview page, Veeam forum and Help Center.

Olga Slusarenko is Senior Technical Writer, R&D, Backup at Veeam Software.