Amount of data transferred from Office 365

[rafaelmn]

Hello everyone,

I am a newcomer to Veeam solutions, but my company is planning to have Veeam Backup for Office 365 and a we have a few questions, that I could not find the answer (or maybe I am not searching in the right place) to them.

The questions are:
- How the information is transferred from Office 365 to the backup repository? Is it compressed? Is it customization available?
- Is it block level backup?
- In the installation documentation, I do not see any option for customize, the days for "possible" full or incremental backups(?), so, that means from the day you schedule you will only have forever incremental backups?

Thanks in advance.
Rafael

[jmmarton]

1) It's stored in compressed format. I'll let others respond if the transfer itself is compressed.
2) No, it's mailbox level backup.
3) After the initial backup everything is done as incremental backups so yes you could call it forever forward incremental, though it operates differently from VBR backups since everything is stored in a database, not individual backup files.

Joe

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Rafael,

I'll answer the remaining parts. The information is being downloaded through EWS so it is basically the same way as you download your email to your Outlook (or similar program). It happens through the API's and is the only supported way to do this. This does mean you will need to take the first backup into consideration as this could become a heavy task.

Joe also mentioned that the first is full and then they are incremental. This is probably a bit confusing. The first time you will indeed download an entire mailbox for a user and after that you will only download the new and changed items.

For more questions,

Shoot

[rafaelmn]

Thank you very much Joe and Mike for your answers.

Please, let me ask you one more question (the last entry in the forum is "quite old" regarding my question).

Is the information transferred encrypted? or is it possible to encrypt (in flight encryption and at rest encryption)?

Thanks again. Regards.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Rafael,

Encryption in flight is delivered by Microsoft. Every time information is sent from O365 to your VBO server, the data is being encrypted. At this moment, we don't have anything specific for data at rest.

Mike

[rafaelmn]

Thank you very much guys!!

Regards.
Rafael

[rafaelmn]

Hi again Mike - Joe,

Do you have any suggestion about how to achieve the first backup in a big environment? Let's talk about more than 10000 mailboxes (the documentation only mentions some "limitations" but not clearly saying the maximum number of mailboxes) with a maximum size per mailbox of 100GB.....

Thanks.

[Mike Resseler]

Theoretically our solution (today) is only limited to the running database. This means that the maximum size is 64 TB (compressed) so in that case, in all honesty, it seems you will get into trouble with a single VBO server. We are working to support this type of scale in the future but we are not there yet.

That would mean that today you would need to run multiple VBO servers to achieve that number of mailboxes which will be a bit of a management pain today. But as said, we are working on improving this and all feedback / requests / ideas from your side are appreciated!

[rafaelmn]

Thanks Mike for the honesty. I really appreciate it.

Anyway, the same question comes to my mind regarding the initial backup of such big environments. Even, dividing the backup in multiple VBO servers, do you have any suggestion on how to complete the first backup? It will be very challenging to transfer more than 1000 mailboxes (it is just my idea to divide in groups of around 1000 mailboxes .....) so, any idea will be really appreciated.

Of course, if finally we find a feasible solution, I will give you my feedback.

Regards.

[Mike Resseler]

The biggest problem is going to be the download speed from O365. This is throttled and can only be changed through a support call with Microsoft. You can find that explanation in our user guide here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo36 ... tml?ver=10

I will ask to the DEV's if there is something from our side that can be changed but I doubt it. Will let you know

[Mike Resseler]

Rafael,

Talked to our teams and we actually have a customer with 4k+ mailboxes that has improved the speed. However, a few items can be adjusted (besides having enough memory (should be seized on the recommendations of Exchange server)). You can contact our support team and they will be able to assist you further with those suggestions.

Thanks
Mike

[jchillman]

Do you have any information on the 4K deployment that will be of use to other users? Such as hardware used and time to process 4k mailboxes?

[Mike Resseler]

James,

I don't have anything to share on time (but think days). From a hardware perspective (I believe) the server received 48 Gig of RAM (per exchange practices recommendations) which increased the speed as VBO + the database could use the necessary RAM and the OS wasn't forced to swap. We are still working with a few larger customers to identify potential time savings (or better performance if you will) so if you are in that case, make sure to log a support case so we call help you further with above mentioned suggestions (and at the same time learn from different environments also )

Mike