Litigation Hold Items - Folder in Mailbox

[nipunpawar1]

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to get an opinion and confirmation from the Veeam community on this topic.

I recently unchecked the folder in VBO and found some great insights. I previously believed that the Litigation Hold items folder was purely for organizations that have an Exchange Online plan 2 (That provides a litigation hold feature) to backup items that are on hold for the user.
Upon testing in my test VBO, I noticed that folder works like a Legal Hold functionality in Veeam.

My understanding is that it is backing up the Exchange Message Trace component (M365 > Admin Centre> Security & Compliance > Exchange Message Trace), however, in Microsoft that is purely just a report of every email sent and received to the primary domain but Veeam backs up the content of those reports and saves a copy in Litigation Hold Items folder

Use Case:

The user deletes a confidential email within a minute of receiving or sending it, and completely purges from Deleted Items and Permanently Deleted Items folders in the mailbox. The backup session is set to run every 12 hours or 24 hours.

This functionality within Veeam backup finds the deleted email (Which I presume from the Exchange Message Trace reports) and gives the option to restore all contents and attachments of the purged email.

Note: I purged multiple sent and received emails within 5 minutes and ran a backup 9 hours later, finding all of them within the Litigation Hold Items folder.

Would like to hear everyone's thoughts/opinions on this? If you have tested what was the result for you?

Thanks,
Nipun Pawar

[Mildur]

Hi Nipun

We don't backup Exchange Message Trace.
Litigation Hold uses hidden folders in your mailbox. Microsoft explains that concept here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/excha ... erver-2019

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 will just backup those hidden folders for you.
I cannot say why you have content in that folder without enabling litigation hold on your mailboxes. Something worth to check on Microsoft's side.

Best,
Fabian

[nipunpawar1]

Thanks for your response, Fabian!

Fair enough, I was just assuming maybe it was backing Exchange Message Trace but thanks for clearing this.

I will check on the Microsoft side like you said, as I only have a Business Starter license for my test tenancy which does not offer in-place hold or Litigation Hold feature at all.

Regards,
Nipun