Veeam O365 departed employee retention best practice

[bscit]

Hey All:

What do other admins do when a user departs, but you still want to retain their mail store, but do not want them to be licensed and backed up every evening like an active user?

Export their mailbox to a .PST via Veeam explorer? I see this is an option, but you have to have Outlook installed locally for it to work. We don't want Outlook on our servers.

I tried to get Veeam explorer working locally, but I am having issues loading the .adp repository file from our storage server.

jet error - 1032 err file access denied

Thoughts?

Thanks!!

[Mike Resseler]

Hi @bscit
Lots of admins will remove the user from the job. This will NOT remove the backupped data. It will remain until the retention is over. By right-click on the organization you can still recover data from that user.

Others will indeed export to PST. For your error, what did you exactly do? Did you target the Veeam Explorer directly to the Jet DB or did you point it to the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 server?

[cfizz34]

Look into shared mailboxes as an alternative.

[masterpackman]

Just adding 2 cents to this old post.

1. (probably the best strategy for termed employees in terms of usable results) Use the Move-VBOEntitydata PowerShell command to push the OneDrive/User data to a different repository with indefinite retention (or 7 years for many legal requirements sake). You can then just do restores from the new repo. you can also do this semi-regularly as a way to reduce overhead if storage space is a concern but you would like to keep the existing data. As a best practice of a regular event, you can do this on all termed employees. Consider that this grabs everything that is still within the repo (even things that are past retention when retention hasn't ran yet.) of the given OneDrive/sharepoint site/mailbox being moved, Also consider Once retention has ran and removed the Entity data, this method is no longer applicable. 

2 Talk to management about Creating a policy of adding Termed employees to a "Termed.Backup" security group, back that group up to it's own "Termed employees" Repository with more retention, you can reduce the job run count to once a week if you don't want it backing up every day, consider that this would only grab a fresh copy of the Object as it shows up in the given security group. This  method does allow for more automation, but also disperses responsibility depending on who's in charge of creating and maintaining Security groups. 

3. Consider Creating different Jobs and Repositories as a way to differentiate longer needed retention for VIP/mission critical data

4. Consider litigation hold (eDiscovery hold) on all or some accounts as needed.

Consider that there could be a few more solutions including scripts to run automatically / periodically pulling User info from MS365 and creating/running jobs, creating repositories, and/or Move-VBOEntitydata. 

I haven't done this is my environment yet but such scripting is theoretically possible with enough knowledge about how to grab UserID GUIDs from MS365 and how to define a foreach statement.

Otherwise sounds like a nice feature request to do a similar function within the software for Automatic Backup of termed employees.