Difference between Teams, SharePoint and Mail

[VeeMike]

My support case: # 05260789

Hello,

Please could you tell me why I should select MS Teams as part of my VEEAM Office 365 Backups?

We backup the entire organisation and we have selected: Mail, Archive, OneDrive, Sites and Teams
However, Mail contains the Teams mailboxes with the Teams conversation history and, SharePoint contains the files shared in Teams

As such, it appears I am duplicating my backups and consuming more storage then needed if I am backing up the chat history in both Mail conversation history and Teams chat, along with Teams files and SharePoint files.

What do I capture in my backups when I select Teams, that I do not capture using Mail and SharePoint?

If I do not capture any additional information, should I deselect Teams from my backups?
If I do capture additional information, how do I exclude those Teams items from Mail and SharePoint to reduce my data consumption?

I have browsed the VEEAM website, forums and a general internet search and I could not find a answer to this question.

Thank you.

[Polina]

Hi,

That's a very good question.
1) Backing up Teams objects allows for more accurate and convenient browsing and restoring of such data using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams. You'll see a team, its channels, channel tabs, conversations, etc, and will be able to restore them back to the initial location as teams objects. Additionally, it'd be possible to export/restore posts in a form of threads instead of individual messages.
2) If you back up all the data to the same repository, VB365 will reuse the data whereas possible instead of duplicating it.
3) Teams backups include not only posts and files, but also team metadata, information about team members and their status in the team, tabs, and more.

Makes sense?

[VeeMike]

Hi Polina,

Thank you very much for the quick response and helpful reply.
What you have written does make sense and is informative.

Regarding your 2nd point however - "VB365 will reuse the data whereas possible instead of duplicating it." - Could you clarify on this please?

I have segregated the backup jobs so we have 2 backup jobs:
1 backs up Mail and Archive, named Email
1 backs up One Drive, Sites and Teams, named File

Our theory was to have an "Email" job and a "File" job.
Each job goes to their own drive on the server (Say Email goes to E:\ and File goes to F:\)

As they have separate repositories, does this means we're unable to use the built-in VB365 de-duplication service?

Merging the repositories would be very difficult as there's approx 10TB in email and 4 TB in file.

Is there a method available to tag Teams mailboxes and exclude from Mail, and do the same for Teams in Sites and exclude them so we only capture Teams data in the Teams backup selection ?

[Polina]

Your current configuration follows our best practices. Teams backup contains both Exchange and SharePoint items, and since files are usually heavier I'd use one repository to store SharePoint and Teams data. This way, if you back up a team and its corresponding site as a separate object, VB365 will reuse this SharePoint data. And team posts usually are just a small piece of Exchange data, and even if backed up to the same repository the win in storage space will be rather small.

Another option is to have a separate repository for Teams and, indeed, exclude Teams group mailboxes and sites from other backup jobs. Unfortunately, there's no tagging to automate/simplify the exclusion and you'll have to do it manually (or, btw, search our forums for PowerShell scripts; if I'm not mistaken, there were some custom scripts that may help you).