Active Vs Inactive users

[Kellen.Flood]

we have 1700 active users and 300 inactive users (no longer with company)...
If we have a user we have been backing up, and that user leaves....i will have an archive locally of their backups with Veeam assuming i have been using o365 tool....but will i then have an open user when we hire someone to backfill them and just use the same license for the new user?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Kellen,

That should be indeed the idea. However, please note that (when licensed) the inactive user will only lose his "license seat" after 30 days. But with the new licensing options in the future and the grace periods, that will not be an issue. But you do need to take that user (inactive one) out of the backup job.

Additional tip: Many companies then use our Veeam Explorer to export that entire user to a PST and safeguard it somewhere

[mfirewalker]

But you do need to take that user (inactive one) out of the backup job

That still seems to be the case. I just noticed that all my inactive users are consuming licenses and that I manually need to exclude recently resigned employees from the backup job. This seems like an unnecessary complex thing to do since Veeam could easily detect that a user no longer has a corresponding Microsoft 365 license assigned and therefore cannot be active. I expected Veeam to no longer consume a license for such users, but it turned out to be wrong. It would be nice to have and option to automatically stop backing up unlicensed users or treat them as shared mailbox.

[nielsengelen]

Since the original topic is from 2017, things have changed though. Veeam will automatically free up the license after 31 days. If you want to speed up the process, you can use PowerShell (by using Remove-VBOLicensedUser).

[mfirewalker]

Cannot confirm, inactive and unlicensed users mailboxes are still actively being backed up and consuming a Veeam license, for months. License cannot be removed because they are still backed up by Veeam. I am having case 04236444 open for this but it's not going anywhere yet. Actually, I have another case open because I also saw licenses being consumed for shared mailboxes and Teams auto attendant users. First answer did not look very promising, also. Case 04250953.

[nielsengelen]

Which version of VBO are you running? We’ll look into the cases and see what can be done from our side (normally support should be fine handling this).

[mfirewalker]

Right now it's 4.0.0.1629. I have 2 issues

- Every user that has been active at one point but is now inactive and unlicensed in Office 365 is still being backed up by Veeam and consuming a license. Is this expected and do I need to exclude them from the backup or is there a way to automatically have Veeam stop backing them up.
- Teams resource accounts users are being backed up and consuming a licensing (They have a Microsoft 365 Phone System - Virtual User license assigned). I think they should not consume a license since they are resource accounts. I am not even sure if they hold any valuable data.

The issue with some shared mailboxes consuming a license has resolved itself.

[nielsengelen]

1. If they are still persistent in O365, you'll need to exclude them. Once they are not being backed up by default, after 31 days the license is freed up.
2. My guess is that they do create data in the background (like a default OneDrive account) and therefor we assign a license to back up whatever there is. Best would be to work with support further and we'll investigate it internally as well to see how it works.

[mfirewalker]

Thanks for clarifying. I will go ahead and automate user exclusion with PowerShell.

I will work with support regarding the resource accounts.