Size of Office 365 backups

[m.novelli]

Hi guys, I'm running some Office 365 backups and I'm finding that the file/folder size on disk and the email report is quite smaller than expected, smaller by hundreds of GB looking the space reported as used by Exchange Online

Is Veeam Backup for Office 365 doing some highly efficient compression/deduplication during the backup?

Thanks for any info,

Marco

[Mike Resseler]

Marco,

There are two reasons why this difference can be there:

1. What is your retention? Think about all the emails that are still in Exchange Online but are already past the retention period so they won't be in your database
2. We use a JET DB database as repository. That includes internal compression

Hope it helps
Mike

[m.novelli]

Ok, I've just realised now what Veeam Backup for Office 365 means as "retention"... I thought it was saving everything, not just the last X years

This particular configuration settings need a better naming / explanation. Last week I've backupped and exported a single mailbox for a customer but just now I've realised that I've saved only the last 3 years

Marco

[Mike Resseler]

Marco,

Any suggestions? Retention is typically used in this specific scenario. Think about in-place retention which works the same way but we are always open in suggestions that make it easier and better for anyone

[m.novelli]

I'm coming from Veeam Backup & Replication, so "retention for 3 years" to me means: take a full backup and retain for 3 years the incremental backups before merging them in full backup and discard them

The "retention" word should be replaced by "save last x years of emails"

My 2 cents

Marco

[Mike Resseler]

Thanks Marco,

I appreciate your feedback

Mike

[pesos]

I know this is an older thread and obviously things are still named this way, but I found this similarly confusing and read it the same way Marco did.

So there isn't a way for us to specify how long we want to have a rolling window of full mailbox data backup, similar to the way we do with onprem exchange?

[Mike Resseler]

John,

The way you can achieve this is by installing a Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 proxy on a virtual machine and then protect the VM with Veeam Backup and Replication. We have built-in logic into VBR to detect what server it is and it allows you to do item-level recovery with our explorer from that image backup

[pesos]

Hi Mike,

We installed veeam o365 on an existing B&R server. We are using one of our hyper-v hosts as the backup proxy (since our repository is on a DAS on that server).

How would we do what you're describing in this scenario?

[Mike Resseler]

Since you are using a host as a backup proxy then I am afraid it is not possible (unless you use Veeam Agent for Windows to take a backup). The problem will be that this won't be recognized as a VBO backup and you will need to restore the repository databases first and then restore items.

I understand your request and we are thinking about this but I cannot promise that something like this will come to VBO natively soon as the retention is different. As an additional question to that. Do you see this type of archiving in 2 steps? (Current retention and long-term archiving is restore points of full mailboxes) or even different. Interested to understand your requirement

Cheers

Mike