Office 365 Mailbox Backup: Recommended and Not Recommended
Many of our regular customers are used to traditional on-premises systems, where maintenance of SharePoint, file shares, databases, Exchange, or other business applications is spread across multiple teams on different servers with Microsoft Consulting firm.
Most of our customers first consider Outlook or Exchange backup solutions focused only on Exchange Online backup, not realizing that now their entire world is contained in Office 365 . Beyond mailboxes, it's now a core part of Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams.
The problem
What once stood as separate stacks are now consolidated into a single service in Office 365. Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Groups and Teams, and other solutions are now available to every user on the licensing basis. Administrators are thus confronted with both simpler and more demanding conditions for the configuration and control of the elements of their entity.
Since Office 365 is a multi-entity system, administrators cede to Microsoft certain control functions traditionally held at the server and architecture level (backup, certain security configurations, resilience rules, etc.). Here are some guidelines on what is recommended and not recommended to do when backing up Office 365 email (as well as other stacks).
Do's and Don'ts of Email Backup
Do Take advantage of In-Place Archiving (and make sure admins understand its value). In-Place Archiving allows users to archive content to a specific location in their inbox for long-lasting retention. As an administrator, you can control retention policy and leverage eDiscovery for compliance framework requirements that many organizations face. You can find more information about this here.
Don'ts Rely on end users to implement an immutable email archive suitable for all content that needs to be backed up. Just because an end user can archive content directly in Outlook doesn't mean it's a true backup for Outlook 365 or Office 365 as a whole. Be sure to set entity-wide retention policies by implementing smart solutions. Here you will find an article comparing archiving and backup.
Do Review the License Agreement and SLAs listed for the corresponding license level offered by Office 365 and Microsoft. Until an incident occurs, many customers believe that Microsoft's out-of-the-box SLAs are sufficient to meet regulatory requirements or their company's recovery requirements. Archiving in Office 365 email is not a backup. You can find more information about this here with Al Rafay Consulting Chicago.
Don'ts Rely solely on archiving for backup. Like local solutions, archiving is not a backup solution. Exchange Mail Backup is a separate service from the out-of-the-box features offered by Microsoft. You can find more information about this here.
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