M365 Mailbox Backup increase since friday / latest August MS Patch installation

[m.novelli]

You might have a point about finding someone in MS who will answer you tho!

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Nice joke

Marco

[m.novelli]

You just replied to THE physical person in Veeam who has the power and is willing to help - and would get this changed if it was practical to do so.
Look at Gostev's job title near his name in the right column .

Also - having spoken with Gostev a lot, both on here and in person, I'm completely sure that if it was practical to safely improve this situation from the Veeam side Gostev would have had them do that. He has the power, he's had them look at it and he's said it's not safely practical, and I don't think he'd misrepresent that.

You're angry with the wrong person in the wrong vendor. Take your frustrations out on Microsoft who changed the data. Good luck getting hold of anyone remotely as senior as Gostev in MS. This is why we love the Veeam R&D forums - the people who know the product and have real power to make real change hang out here and listen to us.

I'm practical, the aim is to help end customers to avoid increased billing and waste of backup space. No one in Microsoft or Veeam will solve this

The Partner is alone as usual to manage (right) frustation from end-users

In IT world is more and more common that shit happens and the end customer has to pay and not get any refund. This is just broken.

Marco

[robg]

Two of my clients asked me why we weren't migrating to Office 365 "like everyone else"

It's because of their reliability and problems like this. And now that Exchange server's future has been announced, I don't see a reason to ever ditch it.

[m.novelli]

I see the main issue in Microsoft 365 with pricing going insane year after year, so who remained On-Premises lose some handy features (OneDrive / Sharepoint) and security features, but BUT is more more and competitive on the market due to BIG money saving on recurring expenses

Marco

[Mike Resseler]

Marco, Rob,

I am very interested in hearing all the reasons why you would stay on-premises and how you will "overcome" the missing handy features. You are not the first that I hear talk about it, and I start to hear (albeit still rarely) organizations investigating to go back on-premises (or study M365 alternatives, although I never heard a positive thing about that). Some of that information is always good for me when I am discussing with MSFT certain pain points. And if the feedback comes from customers (and not from that Veeam backup guy ) they tend to listen a bit more

[m.novelli]

My company resell 120k+ euro/month of Azure Cloud services for about 100+ customer and the pricing gap is insane when compared to On-Premises solutions. We work in SMB market in Italy and when customers see the prices 90% decide to not to proceed with cloud project. Who is already on Azure has seen about a 50% cost increase in the last 2 - 3 years, some due to additional security features or bigger VM or better/bigger disks, but anyway is a +50% cost increase not budgeted thanks to euro/dollar exchange rate always favorable to Microsoft (but is the same on AWS side)

Microsoft 365 has similar issue, Microsoft continue to add feature but you know the old good rule 80% of users use 20% of feature. Now probably the rule is 90/10. I add myself to this rule, I'm a 20+ years IT Technician and I still use the same basic features of Outlook / Word / Excel. Sharepoint / Teams has been the only nice addition in the last years, but anyway I still use the same basic feature set and the price increased mmm maybe 25% in the last two years. My company manage roughtly 10.000 M365 seats over 500+ customers and money going in the Google / Microsoft / AWS pockets is not available to others. Big IT Company are becoming more powerfull than Sovereign States, advanced AI like Chat GPT is the point of no return

I hope in some second line player like Zimbra / Zoom to create a "basic" Microsoft 365 suite at 1/4 of the price. Commodity like email and file sharing are nice located in the Cloud, but at a fair price / feature set

In future I will migrate back On-Prem some Azure customers with IaaS (very easy), impossible to do the same with Microsoft 365 services, too much effort

Marco

[robg]

25% increase in the last 2 years? I'm not surprised, Microsoft has people by the balls, it'll just keep going up, due to nothing more than pure greed.

One of my clients has 80 mailboxes and many of them are approaching 70GB in size, for that they would need the enterprise tier of O365. That would cost them over 34,000 annually and that was enough to remind them that Exchange is perfectly good enough, and costs almost nothing. It's as close to set-and-forget as you can get, if you keep up with the updates.

To answer your question, there aren't many handy features to overcome from O365, because MS didn't invent file syncing and sharing with Onedrive, and they didn't invent the Intranet with Sharepoint. There are many alternatives to these. Teams isn't necessary either, there are things like Slack and Zoom.

[m.novelli]

Yeah, would be nice an alliance / fusion between Zoom / Zimbra / Dropbox / Slack / OpenOffice or similar players to create a rival suite to Microsoft 365 at 1/3 of the cost

Alone they cannot survive, and they are already late, so I hope they act fast

I don't like the idea of Exchange On-Premises, but for big companies will be again a real option due to insane Microsoft prices and push of premium licenses

Marco

[robg]

MS Office Home and Business v2021 is about $230 on amazon. No hassling ever with an employee having to login to use it, it's tied to the workstation.

And since an older version of office stays viable for up to 10 years, it's a no brainer, compared to the amount of money they bleed out of you with a monthly subscription

[ReKe]

10 years updates for Office? Office 2021 comes out with 5 years. End is october 2026. If you buy it now you have only 3 years left. 230 USD for 3 years is around 75 USD per year. MS knows how to push you to 365.

[robg]

There are people who still use Office 2013 without any issues. All of their documents are compatible with modern versions.

[ReKe]

But without any Security-Updates. If you need any kind of Cyber-Insurance you can't use Office 2013 any more. They tell you to use only software that is in active maintenance.

[robg]

It depends on the policy, and it depends entirely on the environment. You would have to assume that everyone who uses office also uses email, that their email isn't filtered for any phishing, and that they regularly trade documents back and forth with risky, unknown people. Don't just assume that all users are the same..

[karsten123]

conversation is drifting away from the original topic

[ProfileX]

Just curious if anyone else noticed a big increase in backup size? I don't have a lot of details to go on but about the same time that this error resolved itself, the mailbox backups tripled in size. We also upgraded VBM365 during the troubleshooting, so it may be related to the 7.x version.

[m.novelli]

There was another thread related to this issue, Microsoft changed / updated something in background in Exchange Online and Veeam backupped again all messages in mailboxes

Marco

[Mildur]

Hello @ProfileX

I moved your question to the topic Marco mentioned.
The increased mailbox size backup was reported and resolved in August/September 2023.
We have a KB: https://www.veeam.com/kb4483

Please contact our customer support team if you had this issue in the last few weeks.

Best,
Fabian

[ProfileX]

Thanks for the reply & info. This would explain the backup size increase, however mailbox exports to PST also increased at the same time. For example:

- Full mailbox export with Get-VEXMailbox/Export-VEXItem before 7.x = 3.7GB .pst file
- Same mailbox now exports to a 12.8GB .pst file, with no big changes in attachments or anything related
- Same mailbox from Outlook exports to a 3.3GB .pst file

[Gostev]

This is quite logical considering the root cause. The M365 backend update caused existing objects in some mailboxes to be marked as new/unique, thus backed up by Veeam as new/unique, and stored in backup as new/unique.

[nathano]

unfortunately it looks like this is happening again. case logged (07207336) and was pointed to KB4483 which has been updated. I have seen spikes in storage consumption in the last week of March, with one around mid March

[m.novelli]

Same "issue" with one customer yesterday. One mailbox has been re-backupped entirely. Maybe happened to more customers, I just noticed this one because the backup time exceeded the backup window and I've got a warning

Marco

[VNR-LF]

i can confirm we first started seeing this issue on march 26th and have seen it in every exchange backup since. not all mailboxes are affected, and it's not necessarily the same mailboxes each day.

kind regards,
lars

[WolfgangKr]

same here, our environment started with the described behaviour on march 26th. our four exchange backupjobs ran for a week when we finally stopped them, they downloaded till cancellation around 4TB (normal are around 200GB/day for all 4 jobs). hard to say what mailboxes are affected as we backup almost 7000. case#07207932

[AlexHeylin]

Thanks for the updates. We'll keep our eyes on our backup run times, and storage consumption.

[AlexHeylin]

We've also seen run times and storage for some jobs increase

[bielekovve]

Hi,

we are massively impacted by this issue, too... We have 30K+ mailboxes, onprem S3 - Case #07210033

Kind regards, thanks in advance for a quick solution...

[m.novelli]

I can't imagine extra costs for people backupping to Cloud Storage because Microsoft did some modification on their backend...

I think VBO architecture / best practices should be updated and targeted as an on-prem solution with una tantum / predictable costs. I'm using VBO for SMB Customers and all my installations are on-prem

Marco

[RobM_Dutch]

Happing to us again too!
We had this issue in the past and now, after being hit by the MS4569 issue, which was "fixed" using the workaround we see a spike in storage usage and backup time. Looking back we have this issue for some day's now. My point during the previous occurrence was that Veeam and M$ should talk and prevent issues like this. It's impacting ALL customers in a massive way and there is no way to get the lost storage back. Very bad this is happening again.

[Polina]

Hi Rob,

I fully agree that being hit by the same issue twice is... unpleasant (for Veeam too, trust me). The discussion with Microsoft on how Veeam can stop being impacted by such changes is still ongoing. Unfortunately, any changes to the existing behavior or adding some new functionality take time to be implemented.

[johan.h]

As for the discussion with Microsoft, there are some thoughts on solving this problem in a different way. Right now if Exchange back-end changes, and items change on the front-end, we don't have much choice but to protect them again, which creates a lot of pain on the customer side, but also isn't great from a cost of operations perspective for Microsoft themselves.

You can imagine this is a much longer journey, but wanted to share what I could here.