Office 365 Backup as a Service
Office 365 Backup is a cloud-to-cloud backup application that offers unlimited backup, lightning-fast search, and one-click restore of Office 365 data in Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Groups and Teams.
WHY WOULD A COMPANY NEED A BACKUP SOLUTION FOR THEIR DATA IN THE CLOUD?
Microsoft Office 365 offers Geo-redundancy to protect against data loss related to a data center event by mirroring data across multiple data centers.
However, that doesn’t protect against data loss events not related to a data center, as those data losses are mirrored across the multiple data centers. Office 365 Online Archiving and other features further protect data, but require expertise, additional cost, and time to recover data. And when the data is recovered, it is often unstructured. Therefore, a backup solution is needed to provide a quick, seamless way to restore lost data exactly as it was and where it was so employees can get back on track and stay productive.
Office 365 Backup provides your company the insurance to know their data is protected. There are several key differences that Office 365 Backup has compared to other solutions out there:
- Easy Setup
- No machine prerequisites and nothing to install
- Auto-discovery of mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive for Business accounts, and Office 365 Groups makes setup and subscribing a snap
- Fast Search, One-click restore
- Find lost data lightning-fast and restore to their original location with a single click, and no file overwrites
- Unlimited backup for a fixed cost
- Up to six snapshots daily
- No data caps or overages for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Groups and Teams
- Unlimited retention
- No matter how long you need data backed up, Office 365 Backup does it for one fixed price
- Automatically add to backup
- Office 365 Backup by default will automatically add new mailboxes, SharePoint/OneDrive users, and Office 365 Groups
- Or you can choose to be alerted to new users and add as desired
- As an existing SHI One customer, you will have the option to sign up for SHI’s Office 365 backup service inside the SHI One Portal
- When signed into the SHI One Portal, navigate via the left navigation menu to Cloud -> Office 365 -> Backup
- You will be presented with a sign-up form for initiating a backup order
- You will have the option to choose a backup plan from the drop down menu
- You will see on the right the pricing and what’s included in that specific plan
- Once you have decided on a plan that works for your company, choose a preferred data center that aligns with your company’s location
- Enter your domain
- Can be any domain associated with your Office 365 tenant
- Provide a preferred contact
- After agreeing to the terms and clicking sign up, a welcome email will be sent for further configuration
- Note: The discovery process can take up to 24 hours depending on the amount of data
- An SHI support representative will follow up with next steps
After signing up for Office 365 Backup, you can access your backup portal to view stats.
When you first sign up, you won’t see any status of your backups yet until after the discovery process. You will see a pending state notifying you that that discovery is still running.
Once the discovery process has finished, navigate to Cloud -> Office 365 -> Backup. This will present a dashboard to view your current backup status.
Note: The discovery process can take up to 24 hours.
Restoration Self-Service can be performed by clicking Cloud -> Office 365 > Backup. Once this page has loaded, you will see at the top right Restore Assistance. Request access or request assistance with a data restoration event.
To restore lost data in OneDrive for Business, navigate to the subscription and click the OneDrive for Business tab.
SEARCH
- If there are many users, you can use the search field to find the user whose account you want to search. Then click the user to open the account in folder-view.
FOLDER VIEW OF ACCOUNT
- On the folder view of the account, you can either enter text in the search field or browse through the folders.
SEARCH TO FIND
- Enter keywords of the folder or file name you are looking for. To ensure privacy, Cloud Backup does not search the content of files.
- Cloud Backup also supports a variety of Advanced Search capabilities, including Elasticsearch, Wildcards, and RegEx.
- Note: For a RegEx search, enter "RegEx:" before the query.
- If multiple items appear in your search, you can sort the items by date modified, file type, and size.
- Currently the Cloud Backup UI has a search result limit of 500 items. To narrow the search, you can browse and search within a specific folder.
BROWSE TO FIND
- Click any folder or sub-folder to browse its contents. You can then sort the items in a folder by date modified, file type, and size, or filter them by date.
- As you drill down into folders, your path is tracked at the top of the screen. If you want to navigate back, simply click on the path to open a menu and select the folder you want to return to.
INDIVIDUAL ITEM RESTORE
- To restore individual files or folders, select them and click Restore.
- Note: You can restore multiple items, including different item types (e.g. files and folders) with a single click.
- When needing to restore more than 200 individual items, it is best practice to perform a bulk restore (e.g. full mailbox, folder, list, etc.) or perform multiple batches of under 200 individual restores. Currently batches of 200 or more individual items may not complete.
- If you restore a file into a folder where an existing file has the same name, the file name will be appended (e.g. filename (1)).
- Every OneDrive for Business restoration is a “new item” restore because Cloud Backup does not overwrite existing items. This means that if the item being restored already exists, Cloud Backup will add the restored item back to the site collection with its name appended with a number in parentheses. On the other hand, if the item does no longer exists, Cloud Backup will add the item without appending the name of the file.
FULL ACCOUNT RESTORE
- Cloud Backup also supports the restoration of an entire OneDrive for Business account. On the homepage of the OneDrive for Business tab, navigate to User -> Actions column -> ... -> Restore Full Account.
- You will have two restore options:
- Full Account Restore: Restores all items that have ever been backed up for that account. If an item has multiple versions, the most recent version will be restored. You can restore a previous version by performing an individual restore of that item.
- Point-in-Time Restore: Currently you can perform a Soft Restore which is similar to existing restore functionality, whereby missing items are added back if they existed as of the selected date and time. In the future, more restore options will be added to this menu.
- When a full restore is done with Cloud Backup, it is merged with existing content. In other words, the data is de-duplicated before it is inserted into the account. Cloud Backup does not overwrite or delete data at any time. Therefore, if a file needs to be restored into a folder in which an existing file has the same name, it must be restored as part of an individual restore.
PREVIOUS VERSION RESTORE
- By default, Cloud Backup will restore the most recent version of a file. However, if versioning is enabled you can restore previous versions. To do so, navigate to Actions -> ... -> Version History to open a window in which you can select the version you want to restore.
RESTORE PROCESS
- While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:
- The overall size of the data set being restored
- Microsoft Office 365 throttling
- Microsoft Azure throttling
- The overall availability of Office 365
- During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.
To restore lost data in Exchange, navigate to the subscription and click the Exchange tab. If it is a large subscription, you can use the search field to find the mailbox you want to search.
SEARCH
- If there are many mailboxes in the subscription, use the search field to find the mailbox you want to search.
- To search a mailbox, click the User to open that user’s mailbox in folder-view.
MAILBOX FOLDER VIEW
- From here, you can either enter text into the search field or browse through the folders to find what you want to restore .
SEARCH TO FIND
- Enter keywords from the header of the email or the name of the folder you are looking for. Cloud Backup searches the subject line of emails, file and folder names, contact names, and more. However, to ensure privacy, it does not search the body of emails or files.
- Currently the Cloud Backup UI has a search result limit of 500 items. Workarounds for this include the use of browsing to narrow the search within a specific folder or Smart Search.
- Smart Search allows you to narrow a search using the following Smart Search tags:
- To:[Recipient Name]
- From:[Sender Name]
- Subject:[Subject Keyword]
- Note: Smart Search tags should be written in the language of the user, e.g. 件名 [Subject Keyword].
ADVANCED SEARCH
- Cloud Backup also supports a variety of Advanced Search capabilities, including Elasticsearch, Wildcards, and RegEx.
- Note: For a RegEx search, enter "RegEx:" before the query.
- If multiple items appear in your search, you can sort the items by Sent by, Subject, and Date.
BROWSE TO FIND
- You can also click any folder or sub-folder to browse its contents, filter by date, and sort the items by Sent by, Subject, and Date.
- To sort, click the column heading you want to sort by
- To filter by date, click the filter icon and select an option
- As you drill down into folders, your path is tracked at the top of the screen. If you want to navigate back, simply click on the path to open a menu and select the folder you want to return to.
OVERVIEW OF EXCHANGE RESTORE
Cloud Backup offers the following flexibility in performing restores.
INDIVIDUAL ITEM RESTORE
- To restore individual folders or items, select them and click Restore.
- When needing to restore more than 200 individual items, it is best practice to perform a bulk restore (e.g. full mailbox, folder, list, etc.) or perform multiple batches of under 200 individual restores. Currently batches of 200 or more individual items may not complete.
- While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:
- The overall size of the data set being restored
- Microsoft Office 365 throttling
- Microsoft Azure throttling
- The overall availability of Office 365
- During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.
FULL RESTORE
- Cloud Backup also supports bulk restore of Full Mailboxes and Calendar, as well as all Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Journals. On the homepage of the Exchange tab, click the ellipsis (...) to the right of any mailbox and select what you want to restore.
Note for Shared Mailboxes
- Currently the only full restore that appears on the homepage of the Exchange tab for a Shared Mailbox is Restore Full Mailbox. However, within any mailbox type, you can perform a full restore of Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, and Journals by selecting the folder in the folder-view.
Note for Restore Full Calendar
- Cloud Backup treats each calendar series as an individual entity and does not overwrite data when performing a restore. Therefore, if a meeting series exists, Cloud Backup will not perform a restore on that series and single recurring items (e.g. exceptions) will not be restored with a Full Calendar Restore. If a single recurring item needs to be restored, a point-in-time restore must be performed on the full mailbox using a date prior to the deletion of the recurring item.
FULL RESTORE OPTIONS
- If you select Restore Full Mailbox, you will have the following restore options:
- Full Mailbox Restore
- Restores all items that have ever been backed up for that mailbox to the selected mailbox destination.
- Point-in-Time Restore
- Currently, you can perform a Soft Restore which is similar to existing restore functionality whereby missing items are added back if they existed as of the selected date and time. In the future, more restore options will be added to this menu.
- Cross-mailbox restore
- You can restore the data to a different mailbox by selecting Restore Full Contents to another mailbox and entering a different mailbox on the same Office 365 tenant.
- When a full restore is done with Cloud Backup, it is merged with existing content. In other words, the data is de-duplicated before it is inserted into the mailbox. Cloud Backup does not overwrite or delete data at any time.
- While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:
- Microsoft Office 365 throttling
- The overall size of the data set being restored
- Microsoft Azure throttling
- The overall availability of Office 365
- During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.
RESTORE INDIVIDUAL CONTACTS
You can restore contacts individually or in bulk from the folder view of the mailbox.
- Click the Contacts folder
- Select the contacts you want to restore
- Click Restore
Restoring a File When a Folder Has Been Deleted
- Cloud Backup will re-create the folder architecture and restore the file in that re-created folder architecture. However, if someone has deleted the site collection, the Global Admin will need to recreate the site collection manually before hitting restore on the file.
Restoring Mailbox Data After a User Leaves and Their Office 365 Subscription is Deleted
- Cloud Backup will not delete the backup of the mailbox. The content will be retained for the duration of the retention period, as indicated in the Settings section of an Office 365 Backup subscription.
- If the Office 365 license has been removed (thus deleting the mailbox from Office 365), this will trigger an alert titled 'Backup [mailbox] not found'. To address this alert, you will need to disable the backup for the mailbox. Once the mailbox is disabled, you will no longer be charged for the mailbox and the alert will not pop up again.
- In order to maintain the integrity of the mailbox while removing the need to have it licensed, Microsoft’s best practice is to convert the mailbox to a Shared Mailbox first and then remove the license.
- By doing this, instead of simply removing the license and deleting the mailbox, no mailboxes will need to be created if the customer wants to restore the data. The backups can still be turned off for that mailbox, resulting in no further charges.
- Note: Disabling the backup of a mailbox will not delete the backed-up data. Search and restore is available while the subscription is active.
SEARCH
- To restore lost data in SharePoint, navigate to the subscription and click the SharePoint tab.
- If there are a large number of SharePoint Site Collections in a subscription, you can use the search field to find the Site Collection you want to search. Once you find the Site Collection, click it to open in folder-view.
FOLDER VIEW OF ACCOUNT
- On the folder view of the account, you can either enter text in the search field or browse through the folders.
SEARCH TO FIND
To ensure privacy, Cloud Backup does not index the content of files or lists. In Cloud Backup for SharePoint, you can:
- Search for files by file name, and can sort the results by:
- File name
- File type
- Location
- Modified date
- Modified by
- Search for sites, subsites, and lists as follows:
- Classic Team Sites by name
- Note: Backup and restore of Modern Team Sites is included in Office 365 Groups
- Subsites by name
- The following lists by name or location, and items within each of list by Name, Location, Created by, and Last modified by:
- Document Library
- Picture Library
- Tasks
- Announcements
- Contacts
- Links
- The following list types have exceptions:
- Events (Calendar List) can only be restored as a full calendar; individual items cannot be searched or restored
- Generic List items can be searched by the Title field and location
Currently the Cloud Backup UI has a search result limit of 500 items. Workarounds for this include the use of browsing to narrow the search within a specific folder or Smart Search.
SMART SEARCH
- Cloud Backup supports a variety of Smart Search queries. To narrow your search to subsites or a specific list type, you can enter the following Smart Search terms:
- subsite:[subsite name] (e.g. subsite:marketing)
- folder:[folder name]
- file:[file name]
- announcement:[announcement name]
- contact:[contact last name]
ADVANCED SEARCH
- Cloud Backup also supports a variety of Advanced Search capabilities, including Elasticsearch, Wildcards, and RegEx.
- Note: For a RegEx search, enter "RegEx:" before the query.
- If multiple items appear in your search, you can sort the items by date modified, data type, and size.
BROWSE TO FIND
- Click any data type to browse its contents. Within each you can sort the items by date modified, file type, and size. To sort, click the column heading.
- As you drill down into each, your path is tracked at the top of the screen. If you want to navigate back, simply click on the path to open a menu and select the folder you want to return to.
INDIVIDUAL ITEM RESTORE
- To restore individual items, select them and click Restore.
- Note: You can restore multiple items, including different item types (e.g. subsites, lists, folders, and files) with a single click.
- When needing to restore more than 200 individual items, it is best practice to perform a bulk restore (e.g. full mailbox, folder, list, etc.) or perform multiple batches of under 200 individual restores. Currently batches of 200 or more individual items may not complete.
- Every SharePoint restoration is a “new item” restore because Cloud Backup does not overwrite existing items. This means that if the item being restored already exists, Cloud Backup will add the restored item back to the site collection with its name appended with a number in parentheses (e.g. filename (1)). On the other hand, if the item no longer exists, Cloud Backup will add the item without appending the name of the file.
BULK RESTORE
- Cloud Backup also supports the restoration of an entire SharePoint Subsite or List.
- When a bulk restore is done with Cloud Backup, it is merged with existing content. In other words, the data is de-duplicated before it is inserted into the account. Cloud Backup does not overwrite or delete data at any time. Therefore, if a file needs to be restored into a folder in which an existing file has the same name, it must be restored as part of an individual restore.
- Restoring a subsite will restore all the missing items below the subsite. A merge restore will restore the items with the latest version of each file. To restore previous versions, follow the steps below.
PREVIOUS VERSION RESTORE
- By default, Cloud Backup will restore the most recent version of a file. However, if versioning is enabled then you can restore previous versions. To do so, click the ellipsis (...) under Actions and click Version History to open a window in which you can select the version you want to restore.
Restore Process
- While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:
- The overall size of the data set being restored
- Microsoft Office 365 throttling
- Microsoft Azure throttling
- The overall availability of Office 365
- During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.
To restore conversations, calendars, files, and notebook in Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams, navigate to the subscription and select the Office 365 Groups tab.
BULK RESTORE OPTIONS
- Go to the SkyKick Partner Portal, select Cloud Backup in the left navigation pane, and select the subscription you want to restore
- Select the Office 365 Groups tab
- Click the ellipsis (...) for the Group or Modern Team Site you want to restore
- Select from the following restore options on the drop-down menu:
- Groups Restore
- Restoring the entire group will result in restoring conversations to the state they were at the last backup, and a merge of missing data for all files, folders, calendar events, and the notebook. This may take an extended period of time depending on the amount of data.
- Groups File Restore
- Restoring all files will result in a merge of missing data in all folders. This can take an extended period of time depending on the size of the files restored.
- Groups Conversation Restore
- Restoring a conversation will reset the conversation to the state it was at the last backup. A restore can take an extended period of time depending on the size of the conversation.
- Calendar Restore
- Restoring all calendar events will result in a merge with existing events.
- Group Notebook Restore
- Restoring the entire group notebook will result in a merge with the existing notebook.
- Review the details that appear and click Confirm to proceed
Note: When a restore operation is initiated, a spinner may not appear but the restore should be working.
INDIVIDUAL RESTORE OPTIONS
- Currently you can restore individual files and individual conversations. To restore an individual file or conversation:
- Click the Group in which the file resides
- Select Files or Conversations
- Browse through the folder structure to find the file or conversation you want to restore, or use the search box above the list
- Select the item(s) and click Restore
- If you would like to modify your Office 365 Backup subscription, click on Cloud -> Office 365 -> Backup. Once this page has loaded you will see at the top right Modify Subscription.
- A support request will be submitted on your behalf requesting that your Office 365 backup subscription be changed. You can:
- Specify which mailboxes, folders, site collections, groups, and OneDrive accounts should or should not be backed up
- Change backup source (Full backup or Exchange only)
- Cancel subscription
PRICING/LICENSING
All plans are invoiced monthly. Pricing varies based on the plan selected during sign up. For additional information related to your specific plan, please submit a support request with your question.
ACCESS/SECURITY
Cloud Backup uses an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) application named SkyKick Backup to access the Office 365 tenant. This application is installed at order creation and must remain installed for Cloud Backup to perform its functions, e.g. discovery, backups, and restores.
If access is lost due to the SkyKick Backup Azure AD application being removed or otherwise disrupted, Cloud Backup will be unable to access the Office 365 tenant to perform any functions, e.g. backups and restores. You may contact SHI to assist in reauthorizing access.
WHAT IF I WAS A PREVIOUS OR EXISTING SKYKICK CUSTOMER WITH ANOTHER PARTNER?
If you are utilizing SkyKick via another partner, contact [email protected] and request to have your existing SkyKick backup subscription transferred to SHI.
Azure Active directory application
Cloud Backup uses an Azure Active Directory application (AADA) to access the Office 365 tenant. This application is installed at order creation and must remain installed for Cloud Backup to perform its functions, e.g. discovery, backups, and restores. The AADA has already been installed on all active, existing Cloud Backup subscriptions.
