[Feature Request] - Separate Warning Status for Teams in Recycle Bin vs. Permanently Deleted Teams

[pierre.mahler]

Hi, (Case #08100381 — Cannot find the team)

In large Microsoft 365 environments, Teams backups are often distributed across multiple backup jobs to ensure that all jobs complete within the required backup window.

Environment Overview:
Multiple Teams backup jobs are configured, each protecting a specific set of Teams.
An additional organization-based Teams backup job is used to automatically protect newly created Teams.
All Teams that are already protected by dedicated backup jobs are added to the exclusion list of the organization-based job.
Dedicated jobs and the organization-based job use different repositories.
The organization-based job always uses a separate repository.

Current Challenge:
When a Team is deleted in Microsoft 365 and moved to the Recycle Bin, Veeam currently reports warning messages indicating that the Team cannot be found.
Based on these warnings, our automated cleanup processes may remove the Team from:

- The dedicated backup job
- The exclusion list of the organization-based backup job

However, at this stage the Team still exists in the Microsoft 365 Recycle Bin and can still be restored.
If the Team is later restored, it is no longer excluded from the organization-based backup job and will therefore be backed up by that job.
Since the organization-based job uses a different repository, Veeam creates a new backup chain and performs a full backup of the Team in the second repository.

This can result in duplicate backup data for the same Team across different repositories and unnecessary consumption of storage resources.

Requested Enhancement:
Introduce separate warning states that clearly distinguish between:

State 1: Team Exists in Microsoft 365 Recycle Bin (Soft Deleted)
The Team has been deleted but remains recoverable through Microsoft 365.

Example warning:
Team '<Team Name>' (ID: <Team ID>) is currently located in the Microsoft 365 Recycle Bin - ErrorCode: XXXXxXX1.

State 2: Team Permanently Deleted (Hard Deleted)
The Team has been permanently removed from Microsoft 365 and is no longer recoverable.

Example warning:
Team '<Team Name>' (ID: <Team ID>) has been permanently deleted and can no longer be found in Microsoft 365 - ErrorCode: XXXXxXX2.

Preferred Implementation
In addition to different warning messages, Veeam should expose distinct warning/error codes or status identifiers for these states.
The actual naming is not important, but the codes should remain stable across product versions and languages.

Benefits:
- Enables reliable automation without relying on parsing warning text.
- Allows administrators to make informed decisions based on the actual lifecycle state of a Team.
- Prevents premature cleanup actions while a Team is still recoverable.
- Reduces the risk of duplicate backup chains being created across repositories after Team restoration.
- Improves monitoring, reporting, and large-scale backup management.
- Provides a more predictable and automation-friendly experience for enterprise environments managing large numbers of Microsoft Teams objects.

Many Thanks!

[Polina]

Hi Pierre-Alain,

May I ask how many teams you're protecting in total?
What's the average number of new teams created on a daily/weekly basis?
Are you using proxy pools for those jobs?
Is there any specific business reason to use separate repositories for your teams?

Thanks!

[pierre.mahler]

Hi Polina,

In total, we back up about 300,000 teams.

I’d say that about 60,000 new teams are created and then deleted each year.

Yes, we use Linux proxy pools.
The reason we use more than one repository is that Veeam doesn’t support S3 repository migration.
If you have to do this yourself, you have to scan the buckets, and that’s easier with 40 buckets of 25 TB each than with a single 500 TB bucket.

best regards
Pierre