I wanted to share some context and our current position regarding the recent Veeam alerts relating to SharePoint personal sites (OneDrive for Business) for unlicensed or archived users.
Re msobm’s comment, “At some tenants, excluding the users does not work”: excluding users specifically to suppress backup failures for SharePoint personal sites is not a scalable long‑term solution, particularly when the underlying issue is access to archived or unlicensed OneDrive data rather than a job configuration problem.
As to the alerts appearing now, whether Veeam has recently changed behaviour or not is largely secondary. In practice, most of us would quite rightly criticise a backup product if it did not surface legitimate alerts when it can no longer access objects it believes it should be protecting. These warnings are highlighting an underlying Microsoft 365 platform change rather than a purely Veeam issue.
Microsoft’s changes around OneDrive archiving and shared mailbox handling are a direct response to long‑standing behaviour where organisations retained user data indefinitely after staff departures. This created significant storage cost, governance challenges, and in some cases may have conflicted with licensing or usage agreements.
If you read Microsoft’s documentation on Shared Mailboxes and OneDrive handling, it’s clear Microsoft expects organisations to correctly handle data before accounts are decommissioned, de‑licensed, and ultimately deleted. Microsoft have also been openly communicating their plans to restrict access to unlicensed OneDrive data and introduce archiving behaviour (and associated fees) for approximately 18–24 months. This was well signposted and should not be considered an unexpected change.
Re excluding all personal sites, which was suggested by Veeam support: Veeam themselves note in their VB365 best practice and object selection documentation that backing up SharePoint personal sites should be carefully considered.
Veeam documentation reference:
https://bp.veeam.com/vb365/guide/design ... int-online
While OneDrive data resides within the personal SharePoint site, the OneDrive workload backup already protects the user’s data. Backing up the personal SharePoint site protects only the site artefacts, excluding OneDrive data. In many environments, users never customise or change their personal SharePoint site at all. As a result, backing it up adds extra load, noise, and operational complexity for data that often has little to no value.
As a service provider myself, we’ve been adjusting our best practices to align with Microsoft’s direction for some time. However, not all clients have adopted updated onboarding and offboarding processes yet, which means we are also impacted by these changes.
In the short term, our approach is to exclude impacted users to stabilise backup jobs and continue working with clients to move away from backing up SharePoint personal sites entirely. Ultimately though, I view this as a user decommissioning and data governance issue, not a backup product defect.
That said, I do understand and respect that many people here do not want to see these alerts at all. If Veeam chooses to silence or downgrade these warnings in future, I believe this should be optional and configurable, not done by default. For example, a general setting to control alert severity or suppression would allow organisations to temporarily reduce noise while they migrate to best practices, without masking genuine platform or governance issues long term. I feel that approach would strike a reasonable balance between operational flexibility and adherence to best practice.