Best practices for Veaam Backup for Office 365?

[pinkerton]

Hi all,

we are currently testing Veeam Backup for Office 365 and apart from some questions regarding Retention Time it looky really good. Is there a guideline for best practices? In our case we would like to backup around 600 mailboxes/OneDrive accounts and a few dozen SharePoint sites (mostly from Teams). Data is around 2-3TB at the moment.

With Veeam Backup and Replication we are backing up more then 100 VMs (VMware) with about 20TB data and are using only one backup job for everything which is working perfectly fine.

However, in Veeam for Office 365 I'm unsure if we should follow the same approach. Instead of creating one "Backup entire organization" job I'm considering of creating three jobs - one for mailboxes, one for OneDrive and one for SharePoint and also creating seperate Repositories for each of those types. Then we could separate runtime for the individual backup types which might result in less problems due to less load at the same time.

How are you doing it? Anyone here in a similar scenario like we are?

Thanks
Michael

[nielsengelen]

We have a configuration guide available with tips and tricks. You are correct, it is best to split up in 3 jobs (Exch/OneDrive/SharePoint). For the environment your size, 1 proxy is enough and you can use 3 repositories on this proxy as you already mentioned. This gives you the chance to grow over time and if needed migrate to a second proxy and repositories when the time comes.

[pinkerton]

Thanks for your quick reply - will have a look at the document.

[pinkerton]

One additonal question: Currently with our On-Premises systems we are keeping yearly backups on tape. This way we achive the ability to restore items from within the last 10 years if we are required to so - which sometimes is the case for email at least. We would like to keep this approach with mailboxes for Office 365 as well and are considering the following options:

1. Place the repositories for VBO on VMDK/vRDMs and include them in VBR. Then at the end of each year write the yearly VBK file to tape.
2. Backup the repositories from VBO natively on tape. That means shutting down the Jet Database and moving the files 1:1 on tape.

Is there a recommendation on how to do this as well?

[nielsengelen]

Option 1 is advised. Make the proxy/repo a VM with VMDK's and use VBR to back them up so you can offload them to tape.

We do not advise shutting down the Jet database and restarting it all the time.