Is a restore from O365 service from scratch possible?

[sandsturm]

Hi

I have an architectural question to O365 backup. I'm currently planning office 365 backup for our company. One of the questions from our management is the cloud exit strategy. What does that mean for O365? Can we restore O365 data to somewhere else than the original location (if restore to O365 original is not possible any more for any reason). Can I restore Sharepoint or ExchangeOnline data to an On-Premise Sharepoint or Exchange service? Am I able to restore sharepoint or ExchangeOnline from scratch with the data backed up with veeam or how am I able to recover the service itself in this case? Is that even possible? If I have just the data, but could not recover the whole service, I'm lost in the scenario Microsoft will not bring back the service (O365) after an outage. I know, this is very hypothetical, but I have to have an answer to such questions in advance 

Thx
sandsturm

[Mike Resseler]

Hi @sandsturm
Restore from Exchange Online to Exchange On-prem is possible. There are also other scenario's like export to PST
For SharePoint Online, that is a bit more difficult. We are thinking about a scenario of restoring SharePoint Online to SharePoint On-prem (or to a different tenant) but due to specific templates and such, this is rather difficult to get a good result (and it will never be the same due to the nature of how SharePoint is setup in the cloud). However, export of lists/ documents and so on is always possible

[sandsturm]

hey Mike, thanks for this fast reply!
Just one question to the restore of Exchange online to on-prem. What is required to be able to restore data to an On-Prem exchange environment? Do we just need an "empty" Exchange installation, where we can restore the data from the backup in a second step, or what are the requirements?

thx
sandsturm

[Mike Resseler]

@sandsturm Ideally you have the same users in Exchange 2019 (I say 2019 because that is the base from Exchange Online). So you can start with an empty installation, but you will need to have sync with AD to have those users in Exchange on-prem also.