Issue with Personal Sites after O365 user-account is deleted in v5

[Cyberbear]

Hi,
We've been using Veeam Backup for Office 365 since version 2, and it's been working great.
Last week we upgraded to version 5a and since then we are getting errors in our backup-results.

We get "Failed to process site" with the description of "Failed to resolve personal site owner" on every user-account that has been deleted since 1 month ago (30 days).

Case #: 04555781

The solution/workaround presented to us was to manually exclude those Personal Sites in the Backup-job...
But we have an automated off-boarding process, so why do we need to manually handle this?

Please come up with a fix/solution that is acceptable.

/Cyberbear (Gustaf)

[Mike Resseler]

Gustaf,

The problem is more in the O365 area. You are disabling a user, we don't see it anymore so for mail and archive you are good, it will get removed from the job if you are using a dynamic selection. Personal sites (And OneDrive 4 Business also) is a different beast. They don't get "disabled" in O365 so we can continue to reach it. However, as you state, there is no personal site owner anymore (because the user itself is gone) so we cannot protect it anymore since we cannot check for a license (this is actually new functionality since 5a).

We are aware this is very annoying and that you need to do manual steps now, and we will look into something to solve it, but besides "ignoring" the error, we also need to make sure that it becomes visible for the admin. Because it might be for another reason that you get this error.

Hope it makes sense

[mikame]

I had previous workers mailbox converted as Shared Mailboxes (for automatic Out Of Office messages), I deleted those shared mailboxes and updated to v5 (or updated to v5 and then deleted, don't remember the order) and got similar "owner" problems. Got warning emails regularly and today just excluded these to stop the warning emails from coming, didn't open a case for this. I think there could be some warning about this in documents, known issues etc. otherwise I believe more support cases will be opened for this.

[Solid]

The problem is more in the O365 area. You are disabling a user, we don't see it anymore so for mail and archive you are good, it will get removed from the job if you are using a dynamic selection. Personal sites (And OneDrive 4 Business also) is a different beast. They don't get "disabled" in O365 so we can continue to reach it. However, as you state, there is no personal site owner anymore (because the user itself is gone) so we cannot protect it anymore since we cannot check for a license (this is actually new functionality since 5a).

Why is the license check even necessary? If we revoke the license for the user to use OneDrive that doesn't mean we're no longer obligated to maintain a backup of the data that's there.

[Mike Resseler]

The license check is needed because we can only protect data that has a license. If we wouldn't do that, you would get very weird reponses and many jobs would be in error all the time I'm afraid

[JohnV]

The past versions of VBO didn't have a problem with this. Only V5. What changed?

[Mike Resseler]

John,

Some changes in the API backend. This is something that happens a lot but mostly it is not visible. Unfortunately it is now...

[dasfliege]

Same problem here. As we serve VBO365 for a few customers, these is even more annoying. I right now have one customer which cleaned up a lot of inactive users. All of them (like 70 pieces) are now popping up with this message. It's impossible for us to check for every user if it really has been deleted, or if the messages comes up for whatever other reason. Also there is no possibility to send individual joblogs to different destinations, so we can't take the customer in charge to check it.

I actually don't really understand why it is a problem to get rid of that. I guess no one expects backups of personal sites whos owner has been deleted. So veeam could just go through the list of active users and then "foreach" search the personal site that belongs to them. All other personal sites don't need to be stored. What am i overseeing? Does the API doesn't allow such a procedure?

[mcvosi]

I'm seeing the same issue on my side.

Does anyone have an article on cleaning up these deleted users?

[dasfliege]

@mcvosi
There are defined retention times for all the elements in MS Online which you should follow whenever possible. However, we had several issues where items haven't been deleted even if retention has been reached for ages. I've described the procedure to delete abondoned SP personal sites in the last post of this thread. The process also includes permanently delete the users. Hope that helps: veeam-backup-for-office-365-f47/persona ... 69504.html

[kevin3404]

John,

Some changes in the API backend. This is something that happens a lot but mostly it is not visible. Unfortunately it is now...

Mike,

I've opened a support case for this issue as well and unfortunately due to the number of clients we manage and back up with Veeam Backup for Office 365, adding exceptions isn't a feasible solution for us. Can you explain why changes in the API would make this behave differently between version 4 and version 5?

The case number that I've opened is support case number 04566921.

[Mike Resseler]

Kevin,

Basically we never had to do the "check" whether it had a personal owner or not, but now we have to do it in 5. Since we need to do that check, we get those warnings. As said, we are looking into it and trying to get it solved better

[kevin3404]

Mike,

Thanks for the reply to this! Do you have a time frame on when this will be completed? As I mentioned, this is a big hassle for us since adding and removing exceptions would not work well with our departure processes.

[kevin3404]

Kevin,

Basically we never had to do the "check" whether it had a personal owner or not, but now we have to do it in 5. Since we need to do that check, we get those warnings. As said, we are looking into it and trying to get it solved better

Mike,

Any updates on when we might expect a fix for this issue?

[Polina]

Hi Kevin,

In the next product update, to make it look more friendly we'll wrap it to 'warnings' instead of failure messages. Resolving it in a nice way will take more time, but we're working on it.

[jacobpalm]

+1 for a solution to this. We have dozens of customers in our hosted VBO solution, and these messages are popping up everywhere across the board. It's a big annoyance, as we now have to look at the job log for each job to ensure no other warnings/errors are hiding behind this. When so many jobs are showing errors with a known error, it's a real possibility that something else is overlooked.

Excluding the personal sites work, of course, but since we don't have an overview of which users are active and which are deleted in all of our customers organizations, we have to contact every single customer every time a user is removed to verify if it's OK.

[mkh]

please try and install VBO v5b released two days ago: https://www.veeam.com/kb4092

after updating to this release at a customer where I got many of those "failed to resolve personal site owner", now the job doesnt give any errors or warnings about it anymore

[Mike Resseler]

@mkh
You are faster then we can talk about it

But you are right, we just released an update and this is one of the many improvements in it

[mytsk]

For deleted users we still see the warnings (no longer Error) about user not having a personal site owner (or valid 365 SharePoint license) even in v5b.

[Polina]

Hi Martin,

This is expected. As said, we'll improve it gradually, and the first step was to get rid of the 'failed' status which is what you see in 5b.

[bertdhont]

+1 for a solution for this warning...

[briancarnell]

Same issue here. Does anyone at Veeam know when this will be fixed?

[Polina]

Hi Brian,

Unfortunately, I can't provide any ETA at this point.
And for now, the only workaround is to exclude such personal sites from the backup.

Thanks!

[ryan_gcits]

Hello, just checking for an update on this.

Would it be possible to suppress / downgrade the warning to just be informational so the job still flags as completed successfully?

Something similar to the fix regarding sharepoint webparts failing to back up - there was a fix to add an option to the XML configuration for the proxy. Mentioned in this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments ... &context=3

[Mike Resseler]

Ryan,

No solution for this at this point in time as said above. The workaround still remains. While I understand the question for the workaround, my bigger concern is that many organizations will see no more warnings and ignore potential issues, and then realize at a certain point in time that there is no backup to restore from.

[Johnny L]

@Ryan,

I'm not sure about the size of your organization(s), but here is a (somewhat redacted/simplified) powershell-script to aid adding multiple exclusions to a job. It's way easier than using the GUI.

Could perhaps need some tweaking if you need to add multiple exclusions to different organizations and jobs due to a high turnover.

Code: Select all

# Add sharepoint-exclusions to a job.

#Region     - Select Organization
$OrganizationName = Read-Host "Enter the organization-name "
try{
    $Organization = Get-VBOOrganization -Name "*$OrganizationName*"
}
catch{
    Write-Host "Could not find organization [$OrganizationName]"
    Write-Host "The following error occured:"
    Write-Host $_
}
#Endregion  - Select Organization

#Region     - Select Job
$JobName = Read-Host "Enter job name"
try{
    $Job = Get-VBOJob -Name $JobName
}
catch{
    Write-Host "Could not find job [$JobName]"
    Write-Host "The following error occured:"
    Write-Host $_
}
#Endregion  - Select Job

#Region     - Add sites to exclude
[int]$SitesToExcludeAmount = Read-Host "How many sites to exclude?"

$SitesToExclude = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
$SitesAdded = 0
while ($SitesAdded -ne $SitesToExcludeAmount) {
    $SitesAdded ++
    $Site = Read-Host "Enter URL of site to exclude:"
    $SitesToExclude.Add($Site) | Out-Null
}
#Endregion  - Add Sites to exclude

#Region     - Exclude sites
Write-Host "Adding exclusions.."
foreach ($Site in $SitesToExclude) {
    $ExcludedSite = Get-VBOOrganizationSite -Organization $Organization -URL $Site
    $ExcludedItem = NeW-VBOBackupItem -Site $ExcludedSite
    Add-VBOExcludedBackupItem -Job $Job -BackupItem $ExcludedItem
}
#Endregion  - Exclude sites

The only time I've had this fail was when there was a issue with connecting to the VBO-server (although it's running on the same box), but re-running the foreach-loop was enough.

[DChiavari]

I recently wrote this script that might come in handy. Feedback welcome and appreciated.

[4thandBailey]

We experienced this trouble after deleting a user from Microsoft 365.

To remedy this issue, we performed the following steps:

1. Launch Windows PowerShell (Run as Administrator)
2. Get-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell -ListAvailable | Select Name,Version
3. Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
4. Enter "Y" or "A"
5. Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenantname-admin.sharepoint.com (Replace "tenantname" with the name of your ".onmicrosoft.com" tenant name).
6. Authenticate with an account that has a Global Administrator Role.
7. Remove-SPOSite -Identity https://tenantname-admin.sharepoint.com ... l/sitename -NoWait (Replace "tenantname" with the name of your ".onmicrosoft.com" tenant name. Replace "sitename" with the directory in which you are experiencing troubles).

[moordoom]

Yea, this PowerShell works fine if you have a couple of these, those of us that have several hundred, not so much.

5b did change it to a Warning instead of a Fail, but is it backing it up or passing over it?

I am on 5d now with the 5d cumulative applied and get the 'warnings' now and a new Error for some now -
1/27/2022 3:01:31 PM :: Failed to process site: https://mytenant-my.sharepoint.com/pers ... n-name_com. Cannot contact site at the specified URL https://mytenant-my.sharepoint.com/pers ... n-name_com. Access to this Web site has been blocked. Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem.

Does anyone know of a tool to cleanup these 'orphaned' sites?

[Mike Resseler]

@moordoom

I am not aware of any tool that can clean those up. For your question: No, we cannot protect that personal site, we give a warning and continue, but that specific site is not being protected (as it is not reachable anymore for us)