Feature Request - Backup of Office 365 Sharepoint

[filip.radkovic]

Hello,
our company decided they want to be using MS Teams but we'll want to be backing up at least the files saved in the sharepoint site part of a Team. Will that be possible in V2?
How would the licensing work? Will it be per Sharepoint site?
Will the backup repository be shared between mail backups and sharepoint backups or will we need to create a repository for each?

I would love to be using Veaam for these as we're using B&R and wouldn't want to be forced to look at other vendors.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Filip,

Teams is (at least for now) a special beast . What we did learn already is that files that are stored in a team are protected as long as the O365 group (underlying mechanism for teams) is protected and its subcomponents (as you said: the SharePoint site). However, what we (probably) won't have is that you can restore the files (that you will be able to do obviously) but they won't be visible in the team again (unless you add them manually again). MSFT does not give us API access yet to the data that says what content a team is made off (with links to the files/ chats/ tabs/ whatever...)

So backing up the data yes, restoring also, visible again in teams... Only after manual insertion again.

For licensing: We will license per user (same as MSFT O365 licensing)

Makes sense?

Cheers
Mike

[rasmusan]

what is current status of Onedrive for Business/ Office 365 Sharepoint at this point ??

[Mike Resseler]

Getting very close to a new beta (which will be the last one for GA).

We are fixing some bugs and some other items to get the beta build ready for distribution

[stvajnkf]

This is one of the features that CodeTwo Backup does, and their prices are lower than Veeam.

[johnkelheim]

Hi Mike,

Well, thank you very much for the welcome.
Like everyone here, I'm eagerly looking at my weekly digest every Monday

Hi Johnkelheim,

I think I responded a bit before on your other post.

PS: Looks like I also need to welcome you to our internal forums

Cheers
Mike

[rasmusan]

what is current status for OneDrive for Business backup ?

[Mike Resseler]

Rasmus,

There is a beta available that you can get through your local system engineer

[gabe.lorusso]

Hello,

I received an invite to view a Webinar for features going to be implemented in Veeam for O365 v2 but it did not specify a release date. I know Veeam was shooting for the end of Q2 but was wondering if the beta was wrapping up soon for general availability?

[nielsengelen]

VBO 2.0 GA is now expected in early Q3.

[MILJW002]

Hi,

How do we find out who our local system engineer is? I purchased a low volume license (the 10 minimum), so wouldn’t be classed as a large customer.

I use this is a small lab at home, and would love to try this out.

[johnkelheim]

This is really good news. Could you leave here some links for the for spoken webinars & beta? Many thanks.

Rasmus,

There is a beta available that you can get through your local system engineer

[nielsengelen]

John, your local Veeam technical contact can help you get the beta but we are very close to GA.

[MILJW002]

According to Mike’s email (the one with the turbo charger) he said it’s being released in July. So, if I read it right it’s only a few weeks away!!!

[nielsengelen]

Correct, as stated in Anton's mail we are very close and if all goes well the release happens in July .

[-pekr-]

In one of previous replies, the licensing of O365 Sharepoint is described as per user, not per site. Per user licensing makes sense for something like Exchange, or user private oneDrive, but as for SharePoint? Should we count number of users accessing the site? Or is that total users in tenant, which simply means - license for the whole company?

[Mike Resseler]

Licensing works a bit different for SharePoint Online. Per user you license, you get x amount of TB SharePoint backup (the number slips my mind but will be visible on our website soon). We follow the plan of MSFT

[-pekr-]

I know the numbers - it's 10GB per user + 1T per tenant. Our organisation has cca 400 users, so it means 4 + 1 TB. Just don't understand, how the backup is going to be counted anyway. What if we buy another xy TB of additional storage, which is not counted on a per user basis at all?

[Mike Resseler]

In our case you would be purchasing a few additional tenants to match the number of TB. We want to make it as simple as possible and at the same time don't charge you a "storage" cost. So as long as your user number matches the number of TB in SharePoint, you are good

[Mike Resseler]

Petr,

I need to apologize. I mixed two types of licenses which is entirely my fault. The license that has limitations around the usage of SharePoint is the community edition (free edition for 10 users). The paid solution works as such:

"Each SharePoint user inside your O365 subscription needs to be licensed to backup and protect your organization's SharePoint environment. If it is a user that uses both SP online and SP on-premises, then only 1 license is needed. An external SharePoint user does not need to be licensed"

Again, my apologies for the mix between the two versions

[-pekr-]

Well, no need to apologize. as the outcome seems to be worse than a potential misleading info provided One of the reasons we switched to Veeam (apart from good experience both privately and with the last company I worked for), was the coverage of O365. But then I also believed, that licencing model will make sense. Once again - with the Exchange and oneDrive, per user licensing makes sense, with the Sharepoint, it is imo a complete oversight.

If you guys are going to licence SP online on a per user basis, it renders Veeam mostly unusable for the purpose given, unless the price is a complete bargain!. We are going to have sites with documents, which will serve as a storage to our various ISes. How on earth is that related to the number of users in our organisation? So we've got cca 400 uses. If we would have 200 ones, would the price be the half, even if the same storage capacity is taken?

Once again - it absolutly does not make sense and is going to push us to consider - build an on-premises SP farm, or forget the SP online backup altogether. And maybe even more - we will have to look into a completly different solution, which just charges for the storage capacity. This is really SO dissappointing

[Polina]

Hi Petr,

Thinking of SharePoint Online backup only, your points resonate well with me. But what if eventually you come up with a need to protect O365 mailboxes and users' OneDrive data as well? VBO is designed as a complex solution for O365, and this is why it uses the per-user licensing scheme.

Let's imagine that VBO licensing was different. Would it be convenient for a company to purchase and manage separate VBO licenses for each of the O365 services and tools?

[-pekr-]

Yes, it would, absolutly. I can buy e.g. 50 licenses to protect mailboxes from management, as a first go, ditto for their oneDrive data. As for SP online, the metrics is completly different. We are talking sites here. So I would really expect either per storage licensing, or per site one. Then I would just decide, which site is important for me, no matter how many users use it ...

[n0creativity]

Hi Petr,

Thinking of SharePoint Online backup only, your points resonate well with me. But what if eventually you come up with a need to protect O365 mailboxes and users' OneDrive data as well? VBO is designed as a complex solution for O365, and this is why it uses the per-user licensing scheme.

Let's imagine that VBO licensing was different. Would it be convenient for a company to purchase and manage separate VBO licenses for each of the O365 services and tools?

I'm not sure I can adequately express my displeasure in this licensing scheme without being rude and using foul language.
To keep it simple, and clean, the requirement for ALL users to be licensed to backup ANY SharePoint data makes this product pretty much useless to those of us who have a lot of users but only SOME who need their mailboxes backed up.
We use Sharepoint online as central document repository for forms\policies\help documents\etc for all of our staff since many of them are remote. These staff members are not storing their own work data on SharePoint (that's what OneDrive is for). We have a relatively high turnover rate for a chunk of our positions due to the nature of the work (education based, so its not year around or fully benefited) and so we don't purchase VBO licenses for these positions because they job doesn't involve them generating any organizationally valuable data. But they absolutely need to ACCESS Office365 to receive email and access our organizational data on Sharepoint.
With this licensing scheme and our business needs, this means that we cannot use the Sharepoint backup feature.
It's especially frustrating because of how long we've been waiting for this specific feature to be added, only to now find out that we can't even use it.
We are education, we already pay SIGNIFICANTLY more for VOB than we do for Office365 itself. If we had to license EVERY user with access to our sharepoint our VOB licensing would almost double and we don't NEED to backup ALL of our users' mailboxes or OneDrive data.

Please ask whoever is responsible for this to reconsider. I can't see how it possibly makes sense to completely remove a significant feature of your product for any organization that chooses to license only a portion of their users.
Or maybe providing a special, cheap, "add-on" license for those of us that need to backup our sharepoint data but not every mailbox in the organization.
To be blunt, unless something changes to allow us to actually use this feature, we won't have much choice but to look elsewhere for our O365 backup solution, which is a shame because we are fairly big fans of Veeam software here.

[-pekr-]

Above post expresses exactly my sentiments - per user licensing for Sharepoint renders Veeam mostly unusable as an Office365 backup solution for us ....

[Mike Resseler]

Hi All,

Let me try to shed a little light on our current licensing. We went for this licensing to keep the price per user as in version 1 and 1.5 and we did not want to tax you on "storage" or a per TB type of licensing additional on the per user licensing.

However, reading through this thread (please keep the feedback coming) it is clear that not all scenario's are covered and we need to think again about this. One thing I would like to avoid is to add additional SKU's or suddenly start working with a per user licensing and additional a per TB licensing for SharePoint (too confusing for my taste).

But as said, I am reading this and will take it to the drawing table again and discuss it with our executive team. This obviously will not happen overnight, but I will try to get more information and feedback as soon as possible. In the meantime, please keep sending those scenario's (like the education one) which can help us a lot in making this type of decisions

Cheers
Mike

[lando_uk]

Above post expresses exactly my sentiments - per user licensing for Sharepoint renders Veeam mostly unusable as an Office365 backup solution for us ....

This is the same for us. We no longer need mail backup, we might want selected VIP OneDrive Backup, but we want all SharePoint Sites backup.

Right now we have less than 1TB in SharePoint, so we could use the free community version, but what would the cost be going forward?

[Mike Resseler]

As said above, at this moment you need to have all the users licensed.

For now you might indeed be able to use the community version and discussions will be started around this specific topic

[Gostev]

The requirement to license all organization's users was a mistake due to some miscommunication, this was never an intention. Licensing FAQ is being updated to reflect that you only need to license users who actually have access to SharePoint sites you're protecting.

[n0creativity]

I appreciate the willingness to at least discuss this internally as well as the clarification.
Unfortunately, for us the clarification of licensing scheme still make the sharepoint backup inaccessible. We have many faculty who are part time/partial year who do not require the their email or onedrive backed up, but still need read-only access our primary sharepoint site for general organization information. As I understand it, this means we would have to license them in order to backup the sharepoint site even though they do not contribute at all to the data on the site.

Would it be possible to ONLY require licenses for users with Read/write access to a sharepoint site? This would make more sense to me as they are possibly generating the content that is being backed up.

We definitely have less than 1TB of data on Sharepoint, but we have way more than 10 users. Would we be able to use the free version (as well as the paid version) if the free was installed on a different machine? If so, why wouldn't it make sense to ONLY start counting licenses on Sharepoint if it is more that 1TB?

Honestly, we really want to use this feature, but it makes no financial sense for us to buy licenses for users who dont actually generate any data that needs to be backed up.